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I swore off America West last year after a 14-hour journey to Ohio that involved a long, unscheduled layover in Las Vegas and a lost bridesmaid's dress.

Before that breaking point, however, I had accumulated 15,378 frequent-flier miles. It seemed downright wasteful to let them evaporate — especially once America West, like United and American, started giving out tickets for only 15,000 frequent-flier miles. I could go 800 miles. From LAX, that meant Aspen but not Denver. Eugene but not Portland.

I kept it simple. America West, I said, just take me to your hub.

Phoenix itself held limited allure, but my girlfriend, Amy, and I turned three days into a primer on desert living.

Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's Western outpost in Scottsdale, was our first stop Saturday. To tour Taliesin West — even more so than other Wright homes I've visited — is to be lured into the cult of Wright. Our guide, Weiss, was an acolyte of the first order.

"He was New Age before New Age was New Age," she told us several times. "He was a visionary."

She rattled off dates (he first came to Arizona in 1937 and died there in 1959) and figures (about 22,000 drawings are in the archives), and her excitement often came in inverse relation to the importance of the remark.

"He was the first person to invent aisle lighting!" she enthused in the compound's cabaret — an intimate, mostly subterranean room with exceptional acoustics created by its hexagonal shape.

Wright produced the first distinctly American architecture, houses that didn't look at all like European transplants but instead grew out of the landscape. Taliesin West, with its sloped redwood beams and mortared stone walls, was meant to fit in the desert and echo the nearby McDowell Mountains.

The experience visitors often want, however, is that of living in a Wright-designed house. Taliesin gives a small taste of that feast. Our tour group of about 20 fit into Wright's long living room, and everyone sat down as though it was a big cocktail party, with custom-made chairs to spare.

Among those who came to study with Wright was Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri, now 85, who has become an Arizona fixture himself. About 65 miles north of Phoenix is his ongoing experiment, Arcosanti.

Arcosanti exemplifies Soleri's arcology theory — a blending of architecture and ecology. A city should develop like an organism, or an ecosystem, with symbiotic systems, according to the theory. The excess hot air from a planned greenhouse, for instance, will one day warm houses and offices.

If Wright's notion of living in harmony with the desert was aesthetic, Soleri's ideas are more practical. The buildings are cast concrete, which soaks up heat during the day and emits it during the cold desert nights. Arches over outdoor workspaces are designed to allow sunlight in during the winter, when the sun is low in the sky, then create shade in the summer. The whole development looks like a futuristic oasis in the middle of an unforgiving landscape.

Plans call for the village to be big enough for 5,000 someday — though only 70 students, artists and residents live there now. (There's room for about 50 more, according to our tour guide.) They've been building it with mostly volunteer labor since 1970. At that rate, I calculated, it will be done around 3250.

Still, Soleri has his own fanatical following, and Arcosanti draws visitors with its daily tours, bakery, shop and performances in the outdoor theater.