Week 5: Frank Lloyd Wright's Ocatilla Camp
When people think of Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona, most thoughts turn to Scottsdale. In fact, Wright’s love of Arizona and its climate first sprang from a casual conversation with Dr. Alexander J. Chandler.
In 1927, acclaimed architect Frank Lloyd Wright had come to Arizona to serve as an advisor to a former student who was the architect of the Arizona Biltmore. At that time, Wright was badly in need of a source of income to support his architectural school in Wisconsin. During one of the parties celebrating the opening of the Biltmore, Dr. Chandler approached Wright with the idea of building a grand hotel in the unspoiled desert. Wright was receptive to the idea for two reasons: the first was that a large commission would offer a solution to his poor financial state; the second was that he believed his student had butchered his idea for textile block construction by using it as a façade on the Biltmore and he wanted to demonstrate how it should be used.
Dr. Chandler told Wright that he had waited ten years to find the perfect architect to build a hotel on a site at the base of South Mountain in today’s Ahwatukee. Chandler drove him to the site, where Wright was stunned by the beauty of the location. Wright said “There could be nothing more inspiring to an architect on this earth than [this] spot of pure Arizona desert…at last here was the time, the place, and in Dr. Chandler the man.” The hotel that they planned to build, named the San Marcos in the Desert, would completely outshine the Biltmore and demonstrate Wright’s genius as an architect.
By the fall of 1928, Dr. Chandler and Wright had entered into a contract to design and build the hotel. Wright planned to bring his family and his group of architects to Chandler to spend the winter of 1928-29 in designing the hotel. Rather than pay to house his entourage in apartments, Wright designed and built a camp on the site of the San Marcos in the Desert. The camp was named “Ocatilla,” a purposeful misspelling of the desert plant. It was designed by Wright himself in a single day, with buildings modeled on tenthouses which were erected within days. The structures had low wooden walls with canvas roofs angled to catch the desert sun and harmonize with the mountain landscape. Wright likened the camp to a fleet of sails on the desert, and photographs of the camp were published in architectural journals worldwide. In the accompanying photograph, Frank Lloyd Wright, his wife Olgivanna, and their daughters Svetlana and Iovanna pose in their car at the site of the San Marcos in the Desert. The Ocatilla camp is visible in the background.
Ocatilla was built in January 1929 and occupied through May. By the end of their stay the Midwesterners were dealing with Arizona heat, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and scorpions, and were ready to return to Wisconsin. They planned to return to the camp in November of 1929 when cooler temperatures arrived.
Unfortunately for Chandler and Wright, October 29, 1929, brought “Black Tuesday,” and the ensuing Great Depression ultimately doomed the San Marcos in the Desert. Dr. Chandler and Frank Lloyd Wright tried for a number of years to procure financing for the project without success. Wright and his team never returned to the Ocatilla camp. In their absence, the camp structures were raided for firewood and what was left burned down. These unfortunate events were not the end of Wright and Chandler’s relationship. They continued to work together on various proposed architectural projects over the next two decades. To this day, Wright’s drawings for the San Marcos in the Desert continue to inspire modern developers. Requests for the rights to build the hotel are made often, but it remains unconstructed to this day.