Design Field Trips

If you are starting to melt in the city or the confines of your perch in the country, here are a few fieldtrips worth taking:

Taliesin West

Founded in 1937 by Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona was FLW’s winter home and also a school, up until FLW’s death in 1959. Today, the site is used as a school for architects. Tours have expanded to include not only the original site, but also the small shelters designed by the program’s apprentices. (http://www.peterbeers.net/interests/flw_rt/Arizona/taliesin_west/taliesin_west.htm).

Glass House

These tours of the late Philip Johnson’s New Canaan home have been sold out since the house opened to the public in April 2007, but book now for 2009! The house was complete in 1949 and became a National Landmark in 1997.

Levittown

The first mass-produced suburb, built between 1947-1951 on land formerly used as potato farms. Though there were four Levittowns, in total (New York, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, and New Jersey), the New York community was the largest and most famous. The houses were identical. The first 1,000 houses on the New York site were rented two days after an announcement of the project in the New York Times.

 Storm King

[photo: tripcart] 

Open-air sculpture park in Mountainville, New York with large-scale sculptures by contemporary sculptors including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Alice Aycock, Mark di Suvero, Andy Goldsworthy, Alexander Liberman, Roy Lichtenstein, and Richard Serra [credit: Wikipedia]

Tags: , Frank Lloyd Wright, glass house, levittown, philip johnson, storm king