Arizona
1991
Canyon de Chelly: White House Ruins
Canyon de
Chelly was home to generations of cliff dwellers, Hopi and
Navajo, have lived
along the
sandy bottoms of three great gorges that have sliced through the plateau under the Chuska Mountains.
Monument Valley
The product of millions of years of weather cutting through soft
sandstone and shale,
leaving wind-sculpted spires and monoliths where harder stone endured.
The Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon -- it's big!
2001
Taliesin West
Frank
Lloyd Wright literally created Taliesin
West "out of the desert." Wright was
drawn to Arizona as early as 1927
when he was asked to collaborate on designs
for the Arizona Biltmore. In 1937, two years after
designing
Fallingwater, Wright purchased
several hundred acres of desert, and he and his apprentices gathered rocks
from the desert floor and sand from the washes to build what would serve
as his winter home until his death in 1959.
The Garden Room was designed, built, remodeled continually by
the architect, it evolved into a spacious,
well-lit room from a long, narrow development of the principal structural theme
of sloping stone
and concrete walls topped with a translucent roof supported by deep, exposed
beams of wood and steel.
An alcove off of the Garden Room. Frank
Lloyd Wright was an Asian art
connoisseur; he began collecting oriental
art
before the turn of the century. After his first trip to Japan in 1905, he
established himself as an authority.
Arizona Biltmore
Frank
Lloyd Wright designed the Arizona
Biltmore in 1927 in collaboration with former student Albert Chase McArthur.
The primary component of the structure is the "Biltmore Block." The
pre-cast concrete blocks were molded on-site
and used in the total construction of the resort. Designed by Emry Kopta, a
prominent southwestern
sculptor, the "Biltmore Block" features a geometric pattern inspired
by a palm tree.
This back-lit geometric stained glass mural
by Frank
Lloyd Wright is in the foyer of the Arizona
Biltmore. It was originally
designed in 1930 for the cover of an anthology of lectures Wright gave at Princeton
entitled Modern
Architecture.
Camelback Mountain
Camelback Mountain (1,500 feet) is a popular hiking spot.
Many cacti grace the mountain.
Utah
Arches National Park: "Delicate Arch"
Arches
National Park contains more than one hundred arches, carved by
wind and water
in a 300-foot layer of red sandstone deposited 150 million years ago.
Bryce Canyon
Bryce
Canyon is named after a Mormon settler Ebenezer Bryce. The
Paiute Indians called
it the place where "red rocks stand like men in a bowl-shaped canyon."
Nevada
Death Valley
Badwater in Death
Valley, 282 feet below sea level is the lowest spot on earth. In
summer, the average daily high
in July for the past half-century has been 116ºF (47ºC), and once hit a
national high of 134ºF (57ºC).
Devil's Golf Course
Par infinity!
Zabriskie Point
Michelangelo Antonioni made a film, Zabriskie
Point in 1970, an epic portrait of late Sixties America, as seen through the
portrayal of two of its children: anthropology student Daria (who's helping a
property developer build a village in the
Los Angeles desert) and dropout Mark (who's wanted by the authorities for
allegedly killing a policeman during a student riot).