Frank Lloyd Wright Spent One Winter Outside Chandler. The Museum Just Rebuilt His Cabin.

A 1929 photograph shows Frank Lloyd Wright and his family driving across open desert toward a cluster of low, angled cabins with canvas tops. There were 15 cabins, built that winter on land near Chandler. They stood for one season. Ask most Valley residents where Wright worked out his ideas about building in the desert and they will name Taliesin West. Before Taliesin West, though, the testing happened here, while Wright worked for the man the city is named after.

Since Oct. 27, you can walk into one of those cabins on Chandler Village Drive.

Dr. Chandler Wanted a Resort to Rival the Biltmore

The camp exists because of a hotel that was never built. In early April 1928, Dr. Alexander J. Chandler, one of the area's most successful developers, hired Wright to design a luxury resort called San Marcos in the Desert. That spring Wright was already in the Valley, consulting on the design of the Arizona Biltmore, according to the Library of Congress. Chandler's site covered about 1,400 acres south of Phoenix, at the base of the Salt River Mountains.

Wright was hopeful about the job. He wrote to his son, "Phoenix seems to be the name for me too. . . . It looks as tho I was well started now for the last lap of my life and work." By May 1928 he had a plan for the resort.

KJZZ reported that San Marcos in the Desert was meant to compete with the Biltmore. Jennifer Gray, vice president and director of the Taliesin Institute, told the station that Wright "does hundreds of working drawings on it, he really was sort of on the brink of starting it." The working drawings were finished in 1929 and the cost estimates came in favorable. Then the stock market crashed in October 1929 and ended the project. Gray told KJZZ that Wright and Chandler spent years trying to revive it, but the Great Depression did too much damage and the money never came back.

Five Months on a Low Mound in the Desert

Wright needed somewhere to live and draw while he finished the resort plans, so he built one. The camp went up on a low mound south of the San Marcos site. He enclosed it with low board walls set at angles that separated it from the open desert around it.

He named it Ocatilla, after the desert plant, and the misspelling was on purpose. The city's announcement explains that Wright liked the botanical misspelling for its "asymmetry." It fit his belief that "there should be no obvious symmetry in building in the desert."

The camp lasted about five months:

• January 1929: Wright builds Ocatilla and starts the resort's working drawings there. At the camp, a full-scale sample of the resort's textile blocks goes up to show the look Wright wanted.
• Late May 1929: The working drawings are finished and Wright leaves for Taliesin, his summer home in Wisconsin.
• June 1929: Fire destroys much of the camp. What's left slowly falls apart and disappears.

The Library of Congress places the camp only on that low mound south of the resort site. Residential development now covers much of the planned resort site. The closest you can get to Ocatilla in Chandler is the museum.

What Taliesin West Took From Chandler

When the camp burned, its ideas did not go with it. The cabins had canvas roofs, drew on the uneven shape of the saguaro and used local materials, according to KJZZ's reporting on the exhibit. Gray described them to the station as "like designer tents essentially."

Jody Crago, director of the Chandler Museum, drew a straight line from the camp to Wright's later winter home. He told KJZZ:

"These ideas of light being filtered through canvas to give a very even, wonderful, warm lighting in a home- that came directly from and is integrated into Taliesin West. The angled roofs came directly from Ocatilla."

Crago went further in the same report. He said the camp "really restarted Wright's career," and that some people at the time thought Wright "had been passed by." KJZZ noted that Ocatilla came before Wright's best-known Valley buildings, Taliesin West and ASU Gammage. Wright spent the winters for the rest of his life at Taliesin West, hosting his fellowship there.

The Library of Congress observes that even without plans for a permanent building, the camp showed how Wright treated land as something that "could reach higher definition through understanding use."

Walking Into the Cabin on Chandler Village Drive

"Ocatilla: Frank Lloyd Wright's Lost Desert Masterpiece" opened at the Chandler Museum on Oct. 27. The centerpiece is a full-size, 1:1 cabin you can step inside. Around it are architectural drawings, historic photographs and film footage from the Organic Architecture + Design Archives, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University and other collections. KJZZ reported that crews were still building the cabin replica on Oct. 4.

In the city's announcement, Crago said the show is "the culmination of years of research into the history of Frank Lloyd Wright's work and Dr. Chandler's vision." The museum's exhibit page says the exhibit also asks how people can live sustainably in the desert today.

The museum's free History Bites series put researcher Derek Horn on the calendar for a Nov. 3 lunchtime talk on Wright in 1928, the year Chandler hired him.

The Organic Architecture + Design Archives is hosting An Ocatilla Evening at the museum on Friday, Nov. 6, from 6 to 8 p.m. The evening includes a private viewing of the exhibit, hors d'oeuvres, drinks and a silent auction. Tickets are $75 per person, with a limit of four per order, and the money supports OA+D's archive and preservation work. Space is limited. If you just want to see the cabin, any Sunday afternoon works and it costs nothing.

The Part of Dr. Chandler's Plan You Can Still Visit

San Marcos in the Desert was never built, but an earlier piece of Dr. Chandler's plan still stands downtown. The original Hotel San Marcos opened on Nov. 22, 1913, years before Wright arrived, according to the city's history of Chandler. The hotel is a different project from the 1928 desert resort. It is the one Chandler did manage to build.

Next to it, Dr. A.J. Chandler Park at 3 S. Arizona Ave. sits on the original town square Chandler laid out, with the historic San Marcos resort around it. The park is in the middle of a renovation on both sides of Arizona Avenue. Crews were scheduled for canopy, restroom, sidewalk and landscape work through late October and early November. The city expects the west side to be done before the 2026 holiday season and the east side by early spring 2027. Check the city's downtown improvements page before you plan a walk.

For a Chandler-only Wright afternoon, go from the museum on Chandler Village Drive to the town square downtown. In one trip you'll see a full-size cabin from the camp where Wright drew Dr. Chandler's 1928 resort, then the town square and hotel Chandler built in 1913.

Wright spent a winter near here working out how to build for this desert, and the angled roofs and canvas-filtered light he tried out here went on to Taliesin West. If seeing that cabin has you curious about your own home's design and what it's worth now, Sanctuary Realty Group can run the numbers. Get Your Home Valuation.