Desert song-urban oasis

摘要

Scottsdale, Arizona is the winter base for Frank Lloyd Wright's enclave called Taliesin West, a tantalizing mix of natural materials and utopian-like settings for the famous 20th-century American architect's school and design office established in the 1930s. Not far from the Wrightian campus is a contemporary enclave of a different sort where fabric structure designer-artist Geoffrey Bruce concocts his own version of innovative designs. Bruce, an admirer of Wright's architecture, claims a primary source of inspiration from the town's connection with the work of tensile tent designer Bill Moss. Moss, inventor of the first exoskel-eton camping tents back in the 1950s, had settled into Taliesin West as artist-in-residence in the early 1990s when Bruce met him. At the time, Moss was creating a line of tensile fabric sculptures that pushed the concepts of shading and shelter further than ever before. Soon, in a manner that Wright would have approved, Bruce was apprenticing to Moss by building his models, writing his proposals and absorbing the nature of tensile fabrics.