Foul architecture.

The much lauded architect Frank Lloyd Wright made his winter home, Taliesin West, just down the road from me in Scottsdale, Arizona. We can thank Wright for some of the most awful, butt ugly architecture in the United States. Examples include the Guggenheim Museum, a silly joke building plonked down on New York’s Fifth Avenue, surrounded bu stately Robber Baron-era mansions and fronting onto Central Park. An eyesore if ever there was one.

Then there’s Fallingwater in southwest Pennsylvania, better thought of as ‘Falling into the water’, a bad attempt at integrating house and landscape and so poorly made that it is in constant need of repair. That’s what tends to happen when your house is part of a waterfall.

And then there’s Taliesin West, a home so intent on being different that it ends up being ridiculous. Not only is the construction quality shoddy beyond belief, the whole thing is capped off with a triangular (yes, triangular) swimming pool. The man took ridiculous to a new level.

Desiring to cap his devotion to awfulness, when completing this horror story Wright came up with a spire so gauche, so totally awful, that he decided it would cap the general horror of the place. But the founding fathers of Scottsdale decided that it was simply too awful to be placed on a residential property so they placed it at the busy shopping intersection of Frank Lloyd Wright Avenue (yup) and Scottsdale Road. The other day, waiting at the interminable traffic light at this center of commerce, I noticed they were fixing this execrable excrescence. What they really needed was a wrecking ball. Here it is in all its awfulness.

Fixing the unfixable.

iPhone 12 Pro Max snap.