Vintage photos of the Arizona Biltmore back when it was originally built, in the early 1930s, are enough to break your heart. Walk through the hallways here and you can find haunting pictures of the property fresh-built, surrounded by a sea of beautiful empty desert.

You could take off on horseback in any direction back then.

Among the twelve or fifteen big lavish resorts in Phoenix, only three of them carry any sense of substance. In Phoenix the layer of history underneath you, supporting you, is very thin ice. it only goes back to the 1950s, 1960s. History-wise you're skating on thin ice. Any time you might feel a low-pitched crack underneath you and be suddenly plunged into the Sea of Forgetfulness. The Arizona Biltmore is one of those few places in the valley with a feeling of mystery and accumulated urban history, that wonderful relief of being somewhere with complicated substance and a backstory.

Here's part of the backstory.

The Biltmore went up in the 1930s, a project involving a whole gang of Chicagoans: the two McArthur brothers Warren Jr. and Charles, who were inventors and Dodge dealers from Chicago who had moved to Phoenix, and William Wrigley the chewing-gum tycoon, and, in some way or other, our friend Frank Lloyd Wright.

If you've noticed that the Arizona Biltmore looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright design, you wouldn't be the first. If you've gotten tangled up in the question of whose building it is, rather than whether it's any good, you wouldn't be the first. The Arizona Biltmore is the subject of a longstanding 'controversy' about its architect.

The credited architect is another third McArthur brother named Albert Chase McArthur. As it happens, the history of Wright and the McArthur family is all tangled up. The father of these three brothers had been Wright's client back in Chicago: Wright had executed one of his famous 'bootleg' houses for him, the bootleg houses that got him fired from Louis Sullivan's office. Frank Lloyd Wright had accepted the son Albert Chase McArthur as an apprentice, in the Oak Park studio, in the days before Taliesin. He was evidently a late sleeper.

Albert McArthur is the architect of that building -- all attempts to take the credit for that performance from him are gratuitous and beside the mark.

But for him, Phoenix would have had nothing like the Biltmore, and it is my hope that he may be enabled to give Phoenix many more beautiful buildings as I believe him entirely capable of doing.

It is totally typical of architectural history to get these mysteries and disputes and bluster and double-talk about attribution. You always have to look for your ball in the weeds. Behind every Craig Ellwood, there's a James Tyler. Behind every Walter Gropius, there's an Adolf Meyer. Gropius couldn't draw. Behind every Louis Sullivan, there's a Kristian Schneider. Behind FLW there's a whole lot of students and participants and apprentices and now, of course, there's a exhausting and vocal and single-minded army of Wright partisans who view their master as infallible.

No question that the Arizona Biltmore is a venerable, valuable landmark and a thoroughly satisfying experience. It's one of the most satisfying architectural experiences in the valley, with many celebrity legends and that sort of thing. The design approach, as in Wright's L.A. designs of the 20's and 30's, is based on a repetitive pattern of pre-cast concrete squares and glass blocks on a grid, in rectangles. The windows are squared-off Chicago-style windows, big squares surrounded by smaller squares.

Curiously the main building does not have a face.

There's no identity to the façade, no single place to look. This is a little disconcerting, and a misstep from the standpoint of creating and maintaining an identity. The act of looking for and not finding this identity is, by the way, an unphotographable experience. The Kamal Amin book about Taliesin says that whenever FLW approached one of his completed houses and found a photographer at work, he would wave his cane and shout out, "The Machine Eye cannot take it in!" I really like that. I'm going to start yelling it out or maybe I'll have t-shirts made. It's a reminder that FLW came up before photographic reproduction and mass image replication became widespread (incredible when you think about it), and referred to cameras in this antique-and-rightfully-suspicious way, and it's a reminder from the master himself that photographs represent architectural experience deceptively, a reminder to beware of architecture built to please an audience of Cyclopes, and the use of that specific phrase 'Machine Eye' suggests that maybe FLW was hip to the Constructivist project, which is kind of mind-blowing.

Anyway.

After you're inside, past the valet station, the entry sequence leads past a prominently displayed back-lit stained-glass window really designed by FLW, and then into the big, dark, box-volume of the lobby, where you're welcomed by a quiet bustle and have unmistakably arrived at where you're supposed to be. This is the closest most of us are going to come to the late, disappeared, lamented lobby of the Imperial Hotel.

Step outside now. Like Disneyland, it's difficult even to get a glimpse of the outside world. Even from the expansive lawns and gardens you won't see desert - the landscaping includes palms but not cactus or yucca. And as rigorous and boxy as the lobby is, you'd expect a formal organization to the site plan, an English garden approach, but that's not what you get. The main garden is lovingly maintained but organized around a hexagon, and a hexagon is a great strategy to make your sense of direction haywire. From the hexagon outward the site plan gets wackier, absolutely counterintuitive at every single corner, spins you around and dumps you at a tarmac edge every time. It's impossible to find whatever pool (of six or seven) or whatever room you're looking for; you'll have to ask one of the employees cruising around on bicycles.

And it might dawn on you, in reverse, that this lobby is amazingly self-contained, cavernous, dark in full sunlight. You might as well be in Chicago, really. You might as well be in the Palmer House or the Drake.

Simple nostalgia for the notion of taking a horse in any direction is one thing, that fantasy of cowboy-freedom. (Amazingly they're still selling cowboy-freedom-imagery by the square yard down in Old Town Scottsdale.) But that's not what I'm talking about. The Arizona Biltmore isn't the only resort to suffer from being surrounded by real estate deals, private homes and ugly timeshares crowding up on its formerly empty lawns like overgrown kids trying to climb up onto Grandma's lap, an effect that makes me nauseated at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs and nauseated at the del Coronado and nauseated here, but that's not what I'm talking about either.

In the old photographs the Biltmore looks like a jewel-box-toy-fort accidentally set down in a great empty sprawling ma of desert, so just in terms of scale and compositional effect, just in terms of negative space, it's completely different now, but that's not what I'm talking about either, exactly.

I'm talking about the physical reality of venturing out into the desert. The Biltmore's former isolation would have made it a completely different spatial experience. Crossing the open desert would have been a test, a moment of wonder and anxiety until you reached this cool, civic, introverted cave. Its psychological effect would have come from contrast and surprise: shade-against-sun, cool-within-hot, safe-within-dangerous, urban-within-desert, civilization-within-nature, order against disorder. That contrast, that's unphotographable, he said, flourishing his cane. The Machine Eye cannot take it in.