Lank-haired children in worn overalls play hopscotch at the base of a long gangway. High above their heads, a team of shirtless men push wheelbarrows.

Here, says Wright, the Taliesin Fellows are at work, erecting buildings for their camp in Arizona. They live and practise there, five months a year, to spare them the harsh winters in Wisconsin, where it gets as low as thirty below zero. Taliesin West, they call it. Home from home.

Other men in shorts and boots are chipping at stone beams with rockhammers. A lanky redhead in dark glasses leans against a doorjamb, laughing. Wright himself, wearing a beret and white cape, draws in cramped, unfinished quarters. He’s erasing pencil lines and sweeping rubber leavings with quick backhand strokes.

Here, says Wright, they’ve made the walls from desert stones with concrete reinforcements. Redwood frames and canvas roofs, as soft as bedding. He keeps a modest study of his own, of course he does. But there are thirty cubicles for his apprentices. They like to work in close proximity.

An angular brick building on the brow of a vast hill planted with apple trees and elderberry bushes. A field of shaking grass. Three men are lifting bales of hay on to a wagon.

And here, says Wright, are pictures of their real home: Taliesin in Wisconsin. The original and best. In summer, there is nowhere else he’d rather be.

Tables, lamps and draughting boards inside a large, still room. A kitchen table stacked with provender. A line of Mason jars with spices and preserves. A horse-drawn plough. A tractor scaling a vast mudheap. Women washing turnips in a long ceramic basin.

Here, says Wright, their principles of fairness and cooperation are in evidence. The boys and girls together. They’ve got many hundred acres to maintain, so nobody is ever shy of duties. On a Monday, boys might get involved with all the cooking and the cleaning while the girls are at the market; on a Tuesday, they’ll be mixing mortar, laying bricks or bringing in the crops together, and so on and so forth throughout the week. A spirit of collaboration is important. When it comes to the division of the labour, girls and boys aren’t treated any differently – as much as such a thing is possible. Knowing the land is knowing life, he likes to say. The most important thing to learn in architecture is appreciation for materials: the weight of stone, the roughness of a brick, how wood can be pared down and shaped. The hand will discipline the mind this way.

A smiling lady in a gingham shirt carries a pail of apples through a field. Wright lugs a watermelon on his shoulder through the festooned gateposts of a county fair. Next, he’s drawing at a table under lamplight, flanked by two apprentices. Across the room, a woman in a trailing headscarf and white trousers draws a crisp arc with a set of compasses.

Here, says Wright, is the most vital organ of their operation: the draughting room. The boys and girls spend hours drawing, drawing and more drawing. Everybody learns by doing, but it’s not a school they’re running. There is no tuition. Taliesin is their home, their practice, and they value their apprentices as colleagues. Comrades.