Generally file cabinets wouldn’t warrant a blog post unless you sold file cabinets for a living. Not so when you visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s School of Architecture at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, AZ.

Wright hated clutter in his house, and what place gathers more clutter than your filing area? So he moved the filing outside.

Keep in mind that fire destroyed Taliesin East, his first school that he and his lover established in Wisconsin named Taliesin East.  As the story goes, he and his son were presenting their work at a show in Chicago when the tragedy occurred. When he returned, his new servant had axed his lover and her two children in the heads after he served them lunch. Then he served the architectural students, locked them in their studio, and poured gasoline under the door, and lit it. Most of the buildings burned up and only one person who escaped from that inferno lived. Wright came home to ashes.

When he built Taliesin West, his new file cabinet would never burn. He kept all his architectural drawings within this stone structure, safe from all natural disasters.

I asked why the little wooden handle was there. Wright’s file fort protected his drawings from almost every natural invasion known to man – except an invasion of seeds. This tree established it roots in the cement, and instead of tearing up the cement and eradicating it, they keep the tree trimmed.

For more of Cee’s Black and White Challenges with B or W, click here.