"HOW TO LIVE IN THE DESERT"

Anyone who cares a whit about Frank Lloyd Wright should jump at the chance to sign the petition (14,000 and rising) [google: Petition/ CITY OF PHOENIX: Save the David and Gladys Wright House],from destruction. The house is a dazzling performance from those later years when Wright engaged the vexatious form of the spiral, but it also represents a touching gesture to a son from a father who wrote in his autobiography: "The architect absorbed the father in me... Is it a quality? Fatherhood? If so, I seemed born without it. And yet a building was a child. I have had the father-feeling, I am sure, when coming back after a long time to one of my buildings.That must be the true feeling of fatherhood. But I never had it for my children."

Pedro (Pete) Guerrero, Wright's personal photographer, tells of going to David Wright's house with Wright to photograph it for House Beautiful magazine in 1955. Apparently they were not then welcome inside the house so Pete set up his camera at the edge of the property. Wright decided, however, that the shot would look better if some of the vines above the living room were adjusted, so he scampered up onto the roof (never mind that he was 88) to fix them. From a chair in the living room David noticed that the shaking vines and went out and -- according to Pete -- threw his father off the property. There must be more to this story.

The David and Gladys Wright House

Wright and Pedro Guerrero c1955

Wright lived to be 91, David Wright died at 104, and Pete Guerrero is still going strong in his nineties. Surely the house will endure if you help.