Frank Lloyd Wright in Chandler, 1929

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Frank Lloyd Wright, his family, and several draftsmen established a desert camp called Ocatilla Camp to work on drawings for a new resort hotel for Dr. A. J. Chandler

Frank Lloyd Wright, with his wife Olgivanna, and their daughters Svetlana and Iovanna, established a home at Ocatilla Camp on the southern slope of South Mountain.

Dr. Chandler and Frank Lloyd Wright met in 1928 as Chandler pitched a grand hotel on land he owned in present day Ahwatukee. Wright eagerly accepted the commission to plan a large hotel called the San Marcos in the Desert. He set up camp with his team and family at the site the following winter, calling the camp Ocatilla. Wright designed the camp in one day, modeled after the local tenthouses. Within days the small buildings that made up the camp were erected. The buildings 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 photos of the camp were published in architectural journals worldwide. Despite plans to return to Arizona in the winter of 1930 to finish the design for the hotel, the stock market crash in October of 1929 forever doomed construction, before it even began. Wright and Chandler planned several other projects in the area, but funding often ran short and only a handful saw completion. Wright was so inspired by his time in Chandler and his experience in the desert that nearly ten years later he built his home and architecture school in the foothills of the mountains, on a site reminiscent to that of the San Marcos in the Desert.  He called it Taliesin West.