For all the tired squabbling about who really designed the Biltmore, everybody seems stuck in the lobby, and nobody seems to pay much attention to the best part, these 15 cottages.

In the hot dusty 1930's the original configuration of Phoenix resorts -- the Biltmore, the Camelback, the Royal Palms, the Wigwam -- was a main house or lodge, and a cluster of individual guest casas or casitas, cabins, cabanas, or bungalows, or cottages or whatever, arrayed out on the grounds a short walk away. You could argue the only difference between these desert resorts and the highway motor-courts of the same vintage was the surrounding property. These individual cabins gave guests what they came here for: access to the wonderful weather, privacy, cross-ventilation, their own views of Camelback, space.

As decades rolled by and the surrounding space has filled up, and the economies of the resort business demand more guests every year, resorts have taken to building two-story guest-room dorms, or bunkers or warehouses or whatever you want to call them. Sleep in one of those, it's a completely different experience and not a better one. You could just as well sleep in Painesville O.

The 15 Biltmore cottages are "textile block." People say that as if it means something.

Textile block was an experimental process that never worked out -- structurally anyway -- and is recognized as being used on twelve buildings. In the Los Angeles area they are the four Ennis, Millard, Freeman and Storer houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built 1923 - 1924, another seven houses by Wright's son Lloyd Wright, and this one.

Wright's vague hope of the textile-block-slab process was that patterned concrete blocks could be poured relatively cheaply, on site, and that the blocks and rebar could be woven or knitted together to produce a structural strength equivalent to a fabric.

But the 'hope' was a real problem. Wright deposited this moony notion like an albatross on his son Lloyd Wright. While Lloyd in Los Angeles was trying to make the notion come true, serving as construction manager on those four houses, caught in crossfire between his father and his father's clients, Dad wrote him a string of insulting and abusive letters ("I enjoy being with you for a while, but soon I find myself vulgarized somehow by the lack of consideration or whatever it is that emanates from you") , then wrote him to get the technical details when the MacArthurs wanted to use it for the Biltmore.

Structurally this idea didn't work very well. Aesthetically it's a wonderful effect, especially here, and it beats the hell out of me why it hasn't been used more often.

Lloyd Wright and his Dad worked out a system where blocks were produced with a number of various stylized sort-of-geometric patterns. Some blocks were solid, some were pierced, and some had integrated glass.

Have a quick surf at images of the Ennis, Millard, Freeman and Storer houses and you'll see how this worked out. For my money the Ennis House and La Miniatura (the Millard House) might be too patterned, like a busy print dress. In context, in 1924, the single person in the world who was most adept at placing ornament on the increasingly-modern and simplified building masses was Wright's former employer, Louis Sullivan. Sullivan was selective about his ornament.

Consider the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, where the florid spandrel panels are placed in a regular repeating pattern to play against the voids of the windows. I see a reassuring sort of strength or at least predictability there. Meanwhile the vertical "grooves" subtly lead the eye upward, emphasizing the height of the building, then the ornamental cornice work visually terminates the composition at the top. The eye is also drawn to organized detail around the entrance, not visible in this photograph, exactly where the eye should go. The ornament is also carefully scaled.

It's a complete, satisfying composition with a complete message. Today this would be measured with eye tracking, or to use the more impressive German word that rhymes with itself, Blickbewegungsregistrierung.

Consider these Biltmore cottages as 3-D compositions -- the playful ornament, the way the grid is continued in the window framework, the crisp curveless cubic-ness of the entire cottage that make the block-work seem 'honest', those blocky steps with a sense of toy ceremony, the rhythm of half-height ornamented blocks on top edges and window borders as visual organization, the flat roofs and the horizontals, and the way the bushes and ivy and trees save the design from seeming mechanical.

Unlike some of Frank Lloyd Wright's experiments, unlike the main Biltmore building, each of these cottages is a complete, satisfying composition with a complete message. Yeah, sure, their parentage is in doubt, but these bastards are beautiful.