Reconstructed Authorship: Wright, Banham and the Ashes of Ocatillo Camp

Possibly no other architect as Frank Lloyd Wright tried to instill around his work and figure such a strong aura and cult of authorship. Yet, the design and construction of the Ocatillo Camp near Phoenix, AZ, in 1929, constitute a revealing exception. The exceptionality of the project relied first of all on its program, since it was built as a temporary office in order to design the San Marcos in the Desert resort, which was never realized. The Camp lasted only few months, before burning down and disappear as a mirage in the Southwestern American Desert. For the British historian Reyner Banham, the mysterious traces of Ocatillo Camp that were demolished before his visits in the 1980’s represented both regret and a fascinating challenge. As the entire camp burned down soon after its completion, the absence of actual buildings pushed Banham and his students at UCSC—Colin Flavin and Lester Tobias—to engage in an “architectural archaeology” effort. This led them to reconstruct the location, materiality, and appearance of the camp from a few pieces of burned materials and domestic detritus, a couple of floor plans, and a bunch of fuzzy images that were published in the August 1930 issue of the Architectural Review, and in Henry Russell Hitchcock’s book "In the Nature of Materials". Under the guidance of Banham, the two students set up an effective reconstruction methodology that enabled them to compile a thorough report and produce a refined architectural model of the desert camp that Wright installed in the spring of 1929. This output enabled the students and Banham to better understand the conditions of life in the desert while Wright was designing the San Marcos in the Desert resort. Beyond research impetus, the absence of a building allowed for Banham’s indulgence of the mythological aura of Ocatillo Camp, fancifully stating that “these are the remains of what may have been the best project ever to come from the mind and hand of Frank Lloyd Wright”. Through the Ocatillo Camp case study, the text aims at reconstructing and clarifying Banham’s pedagogical style: the manners in which he taught his courses, guided research, and influenced the educational process of his students. Reading the letters exchanged between Banham, his students, fellow scholars, and directors of archives, it is possible to glean the way in which students negotiated an absence of extensive information and inductively reconstructed a rich image of the legendary camp established by Wright in the outskirts of Phoenix. The students’ fieldwork resulted in texts and a three-dimensional model of the camp, which Banham then relied on for his own studies and the subsequent writing of the fourth chapter of Scenes in America Deserta, “Frank Lloyd Wright Country”.