In the late 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright began building his winter home and architecture learning center Taliesin West in the Scottsdale desert. It would eventually house his archives -- 44,000 photos, 23,000 drawings and 300,000 pieces of correspondence.

This week, however, the foundation created to preserve Wright's legacy announced it will move the entire archive, everything from the designs for his most famous buildings to a cocktail-napkin scrawl, to New York City in a deal with Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art.

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While the move will ensure Wright's archives will be preserved in state-of-the-art facilities, which the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation could not afford, it is a loss for Arizona, which has proudly claimed Wright as a cultural icon.

Paul Zygas, an architectural historian and Arizona State University professor, likened the archives transfer to "giving away the crown jewels" to two of the very things Wright despised: big cities and universities.

"It's ironic, to put it gently; and putting it sternly, Wright would be turning over in his grave," Zygas said.

The collection will be moved incrementally and become available for research in New York in late 2013. The foundation still will govern Taliesin West and Wright's summer headquarters, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wis.

"It's a sad thing. I don't believe it would have ever been Mr. Wright's intent to have his archives, his work, in a college library," said Charles Schiffner, a former son-in-law of Wright who trained for 15 years at Taliesin West. "It's a treasure, which the foundation is letting go simply for pragmatic reasons."

Wright despised big cities -- New York City, in particular, even though it is home to one of his signature structures, the Guggenheim Museum -- and detested universities as places to study and learn about architecture.

"Does anyone approve of New York?" he asked, during a television interview with the BBC.

In his 1932 book, "The Disappearing City," he advocated a decentralized, suburban way of living. Also that year, Wright was a bit player in a modernism show at the Museum of Modern Art, which touched off decades of catty disputes with rival architect Philip Johnson, founder of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design.

Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA, downplayed Wright's displeasure.

"Who didn't have a fight with Philip Johnson, and who didn't have a fight with Frank Lloyd Wright?" Bergdoll said. "They were difficult people, and they were both convinced of their own genius."

Wright, who in 1940 collaborated in his own MoMA exhibition, was regarded as the 20th century's greatest architect and was named "the greatest American architect of all time" in an American Institute of Architects national survey.

More than one-third of his buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places or are in a National Historic District.

The foundation retains copyright and licensing fees for Wright's work. The archives will be named the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. Columbia's Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library will keep all paper archival contents, including architectural drawings, personal and professional correspondence and photography. MoMA will house all three-dimensional works, including architectural models.

The Wright work will be housed among works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse in a state-of-the-art storage facility. A staff of preservation experts will be able to touch up or repair pieces that are broken or fell prey to fungus, time ravages or critters while at Taliesin West.

A mixed blessing

While housed at Taliesin West, the archives have been accessible to researchers but not the general public.

Los Angeles architect Harold Zellman, co-author of "The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship," recalled researching the book at Taliesin West and finding a rattlesnake coiled at the door of the archive reading room.

"One of the archives staff members calmly brought the stick with the hook on it and took it away," he said.

Zellman said that as a researcher, he found Taliesin West to be a mixed blessing. The archives weren't publicly indexed as in other institutions, so "you didn't make those serendipitous discoveries and find those things you didn't really know you were looking for," Zellman said.

Yet having access to senior members of the Taliesin Fellowship who had worked with Wright was valuable. "You would get surprising insights that you would not get in a cold university archives," Zellman said.

Wright came to Arizona in the late 1930s and began building a campus on 500 acres of desert near the base of the McDowell Mountains, northeast of what is now Cactus Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard in Scottsdale.

Living in tents and building the retreat were members of his living legacy known as the fellowship, a group of young architects who labored for next to nothing to learn under the master. Taliesin West served as Wright's winter home and studio until his death in 1959.

The fellowship founded the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, which received accreditation in the late 1980s and continues at Taliesin West today.

Initially the fellowship members controlled the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Over time, however, the foundation became wracked with personal disputes, ran up debt of at least $1.5 million and came close to losing the school's accreditation.

The board was revamped in the mid 2000s and now is comprised of businesspeople from outside the fellowship. The foundation is once again in the black, and the architecture school now boasts 30 students, up from 10 six years ago.

Earlier this year, the foundation hired non-architect Sean Malone as its chief executive, filling a position that had been vacant since 2009. He is the former president of a non-profit in Wisconsin known for successful fundraising.

A study into how to best preserve the archives predates him, but Malone said it's the best decision. The study looked at other options, including building and staffing a new archive center, which would prove costly.

"Do we build stuff from scratch so it happens to be on our property or do we reach out and partner with the absolute best partners?" Malone said.

Philip Allsopp, who resigned as foundation CEO in 2009, said he priced a new archives center at $40 million to $50 million. The current archives space is about 3,000 square feet, but the materials should be housed in a 45,000-square-foot space, he said.

Malone declined to discuss the financial arrangement with Columbia University and MoMA. He said under the agreement, however, the Wright collection cannot be split up or sold.

Saying goodbye to an unprecedented body of work by an artistic legend could easily be summed up as a loss for Arizona and win for New York, said Jim Ballinger, Phoenix Art Museum director.

"But it's the silent partner you want to think about -- the archives," said Ballinger, whose museum hosted a Wright exhibit last year.

The staff at the museum and the Avery, often called this country's best architectural archive, will well serve Wright's legacy, giving the foundation the focus and funds to devote to the two Taliesins, in Arizona and Wisconsin, Ballinger said.

"And to that end, it will tremendously help Arizona. And that will heighten Wright's visibility," Ballinger said.

Enriching Taliesin West

Malone said the public isn't likely to notice any difference. Visitors still will experience Taliesin West's rich history during improved daily tours, which Malone hopes will attract record numbers of up to 150,000 people this year. All the furnishings and other artifacts that visitors have seen during tours will stay on site.

Without the need to build an archives facility in Scottsdale, money now can go toward restoring the buildings at Taliesin West and their contents, Malone said.

This past year, the living room where the Wrights entertained guests underwent a face-lift circa-1959 style with new carpet and replacement of some roof canvas.

In addition, the foundation, which at times has been seen as insular, plans to now focus "significant energy exploring ways of make the tour experience more meaningful and relevant for tour guests," Malone said.

Local tourism officials are confident Taliesin West will remain a prominent attraction after the archives are gone.

The site itself, more than just the archives, is what makes Taliesin West appealing to visitors, said Rachel Sacco, president of the Scottsdale Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Reaching vast New York audiences and those who visit there could steer more people to Scottsdale, as they seek to learn more about Wright, she said.

"While we lament the loss, we're taking an optimistic and entrepreneurial view," she said.

Meanwhile, MoMA's Bergdoll said a greater number of people will benefit from having Wright's work in New York. Many more researchers and scholars are likely to come to New York City than Scottsdale, he said, especially from Europe. About 30 to 50 researchers a year came to Taliesin West for the archives.

The museum and the Avery are planning to exhibit and arrange programming around the Wright collection that Taliesin West did not have the resources to do.

"In neither place are they going to be papers that are buried away," Bergdoll said.

Well-known Valley architect Will Bruder called the archive move "a big win."

Getting bogged down in what-would-Frank-do musings and lamenting a geographic loss -- even if it is considered monumental -- misses the point, he said.

"The idea is so provincial, I can't even see straight," Bruder said. What matters most is safeguarding and celebrating Wright's legacy for hundreds of years to come, he said.

"The Wright drawings are finally going to be protected and immediately accessed rather than remaining in the musky old closets of Taliesin West," Bruder said. "They deserve to be under the ownership of the world."