<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"View Slideshow\n\nFrank Lloyd Wright would whirl in his grave if he could see the tide of Tuscan-style mansions that has washed over the high desert around Taliesin West, which he designed as an organic outgrowth of the land. His example inspired Edward M. Jones, who practices in Phoenix, to create a radically different but equally appropriate house, which nestles into the granite boulders and disappears into their shadows. Curved walls of poured concrete and oxidized titanium echo the sensual forms of nature and embrace a circular pool that evokes Wright's visionary project of the 1940s for a country club in Los Angeles's Hollywood Hills. Jones's audacity delighted his clients and initially baffled the community but has now won general approval.\n\nTracy and Lou Ann O'Rourke, a retired but active couple living in Portola Valley, California, bought the site in this golf community in north Scottsdale and chose Jones after he was referred to them by an art collector friend. Both are avid golfers, but their decision to winter here was triggered by the unearthly beauty of the desert, with its ancient saguaros, distant mountains and rich-hued sunsets. \"We told Eddie we wanted something contemporary,\" Lou Ann O'Rourke recalls. \"I asked him to draw a picture of what the house would look like, and he explained he couldn't do that right away because it would develop from the inside out.\"\n\n\"The boulders have been there for an eternity, and the saguaros are often very old, so you don't move them just to build a house.\"\n\nThe architect has had plenty of design experience, having completed 20 residences during the past 25 years, while erecting major campus buildings in partnership with his brother, Neal. The houses are scattered as far afield as Mexico and Japan, but most are located in Arizona. Jones was raised in Oklahoma, where his father was a petroleum engineer, and he dreamed of becoming an architect as a small boy looking at house plans in his mother's magazines. He studied engineering, but his chief inspiration came from Bruce Goff, whom he describes as \"one of the most underrated architects of the 20th century.\" He continues, \"I've explored many of his houses\u2014they're important and liberating. Goff always responded to a fresh opportunity, and he gave me a permission slip to experiment.\"\n\nThat impulse to try something new encouraged him to build his own house on a desert site no one else wanted, close to a giant water-chlorination tank, which he tamed by blocking the view and giving the outdoor spaces a cylindrical form. The Scottsdale property posed a different challenge. \"The boulders have been there for an eternity, and the saguaros are often very old, so you don't move them just to build a house,\" he says. \"Those features, the incline and the views started shaping the house. Curvilinear geometries are the most expensive way to build, but my sketches were very pragmatic.\" The first time he visited the site, he was startled by a six-point buck bolting from behind a rock and bounding away\u2014a lively way to begin his study of the land forms.\n\nHe got to know the O'Rourkes by spending three days as their guest, and he began developing his plan on their dining table. To win them over, he explained how the design would draw in the sunsets and city lights while excluding glare and editing out other houses. Sliding a wall one way would weave an outcropping into the architecture, and another wall would curve around an arroyo carrying off rainwater. A water-filled hollow would attract wildlife, and a saguaro would be precisely framed by a triangular opening. The couple responded enthusiastically to the plan.\n\nConvincing the community took 18 months of negotiation. The Scorpion House, as he calls it, conformed to the community's rules but was seen as too free-spirited a neighbor for pitched red-tile roofs and beige walls. Jones finally persuaded them that the design, as provocative as a stealth bomber when viewed as a stand-alone model, would recede into near invisibility, and even the skeptics now praise it as a paragon of intelligent design. \"Most people think that earth-toned stucco is part of the adobe tradition, not realizing that an acre of flawless paint is never going to blend into the desert,\" Jones observes. Instead, he used poured concrete for the retaining walls and sought a dark metallic cladding for the steel frame. Bronze was considered and then abandoned because a test panel turned green. Oxidized titanium, a material he had used on an earlier house in Scottsdale, proved a better choice. Though costly, it requires no maintenance, and the scales vary slightly as they weather, giving the surface a natural irregularity of tone.\n\nWright is an inescapable presence in Arizona, and Jones taught at Taliesin West for five years, so he has absorbed the forms and strategies of the master, putting them to use in distinctly different ways. \"The lessons I learned early about composition and detailing are very hard to leave behind,\" he admits. The crescent plan of the residence recalls the second Jacobs house in Middleton, Wisconsin, and the drama of the approach is something that Wright would have applauded. From the guest parking area, a concrete wall shuts out all the views, and only the steel-framed stair hints at the point of entry. At the top, all is revealed. A canopied bridge spans the arroyo, linking a triangular guesthouse to the main house, and you can look straight through its extensive glazing to a gleaming disk of water and the distant view.\n\nA projecting roof plane shades the solar gray glass from direct sun, eliminating the need for window coverings, and the house is suffused with natural light. \"I've always tried to blur the boundary between exterior and interior space,\" says Jones, \"and I can detail butt-jointed monolithic glass to the point that you cannot see it.\" Softly curved furnishings appear to float across the polished floor of the lofty great room, which opens up through a pivoting glass door to the pool terrace. Water streams from 254 vents in the rim of the concrete bowl, turning to silvery rods in the brilliant light. They bring sound and movement to a house that embraces the constantly changing landscape."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/jones-article-052005>