These are photographs of a few of about 50 residences in a tight little subdivision in Scottsdale, on the west side of Hayden Road, just south of Mountain View.

A couple of months ago they were going for about $600,000, if you're in the market for a 30-year-old house designed by Taliesin Associated Architects. To be clear, this is NOT a subdivision in Taliesin West, which is maybe three or four miles northeast of here. John Rattenbury of TAA was mainly responsible and it would have been about 1979.

Let's take a walk. On a coolish Arizona November morning with the promise of another perfectly gorgeous day in front of us -- here let me drag in Robert Fagles' translation of Homer for a Scottsdale weather report

….Olympus, where,
They say, the gods' eternal mansion stands unmoved,
Never rocked by galewinds, never drenched by rains,
Nor do the drifting snows assail it, no, the clear air
Stretches away without a cloud, and a great radiance
Plays across that world where the blithe gods
Live all their days in bliss

So we have another day of radiant cloudlessness to deal with.

Let's quickly get off the margin of Hayden, where there's no proper sidewalk and one of those blithe gods might just cream your pedestrian bones into paste with their Escalade without feeling a bump -- there's a lot of drunk driving around Olympus, you know -- and duck into this subdivision for a stroll. No proper sidewalk here, either, but it's quiet. No thoroughfares through here.

Half an hour to walk through the whole thing, past all 51 of these houses. They've very consistent, obviously all the same builder, all white or off-white or that pink color. All the same size. All built between 1979 and 1983. And of course they all have unmistakableWrightian massing and mannerisms.

Something these photos don't capture is the wonder and pleasure of first seeing these houses grouped together, one next to the other, as if they'd herded together here for refuge, all too artsy for the cold outside world. Along with a deep and strange familiarity, that's the general impression, that this is an island game preserve in the middle of lapping seas of ranches and colonials. These are wonderful-looking houses in that context.

How close to Wright are they? As close as you can get without getting there. They exhibit all those accumulated residential lessons. Inside, they're as clever and rhythmic and humane as a real Wright floorplan, with central hearths, visible gardens and well-kept landscaping, tricky fenestration, shading and overhangs, the right kind of ceiling variation, attention to lines-of-sight. Wright died in 1959 and the organization Taliesin Associated Architects went forward without him, benefiting from his legacy, recycling his accumulated ideas and unfinished plans, in the insufferable political position of constantly being compared to a dead genius with a still-unstoppable publicity machine, and answering to his widow with her insane demands.

That's the story of John Rattenbury, who has done honorable work and taken a lot of ridicule for it

I drove by here almost every day for 18 months, over one exterior wall on Hayden, and it was totally invisible. Finally I saw it only because an interview subject lives here and kindly gave me a tour of his interior. To my memory, it doesn't appear in Rattenbury's slide show of TAA's greatest hits (a slide show that includes major projects like the Snowflake Motel and a Colorado highway viaduct), and I can't find it referenced anywhere on the web.

Searches on the Maricopa County Assessors office return the news that $600,000 might be stretching it a bit, and confirm that there are 51 houses in here, but the plat name ("MOUNTAIN VIEW EAST LOT 1-51") is no good clue. The only documentation is from Rattenbury's own book from year 2000, "A Living Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin Architects," where he says that local builder Russ Riggs approached TAA to build 56 single-story homes in a development called "Mountain View Estates," which had seven or eight basic floorplans, and then based on what they'd learned they went around with Riggs again for this 51-unit development, with the floorplan choices winnowed down to five.

I drove down today to check on Mountain View Estates, but I couldn't believe Taliesin was responsible for that.

On our walk this repetition of five basic houses takes away from the experience a little -- turn the corner, there's another house with another cylinder tower, you're immediately tempted to name that model, "The Gugg" but let's not get too cynical or we'll have to find names for all five. This is what suburbia looks like in the alternate universe where Wright's principles took hold.

But they're clones. Correct me if I'm wrong but one reason you hire an architect is to get a space tailored around you, tailored for you, and isn't there something contradictory about mass-producing this kind of individuality? Over at Taliesin they've taken to calling the Wright style "Organic Architecture" which is supposed to refer to a responsive all-freshly-done-every-time relationship to the environment, so how could you organically arrive at the same house on both sides of the street and five variations all lined up in two rows? Taliesin I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying that's not what you said before.