To enjoy preseason baseball, James Traub and his family indulge a love of art and architecture

This was not altogether easy, given the locale. In order to amuse our 12-year-old son, Alex, we had reserved a room in one of Phoenix's innumerable resort hotels, the kind where an enormous staff move around the enormous grounds in a fleet of golf carts, and children spend the day splashing in a vast water park while parents get gently blotto on margaritas. Buffy complained of sleeplessness, airlessness, restlessness.

"Let's just visit the Biltmore and see what it looks like," she said—more than once. We visited; and before we had even left the lobby, she had found a house phone, poured out her tale of woe to a reservations agent, and gotten us a room at a reasonable rate for the next two nights. The Biltmore, which was designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright's pupils, with the master's considerable help, is a manicured garden in which low buildings made of textured cement blocks have been unobtrusively scattered. Like all the great Wright designs, it feels as intricately harmonious as a concerto. Indian-inflected design motifs first glimpsed on a light fixture recur on a retaining wall, or on the monolith rising from the pool. The sound of water lightly cascading follows you from lobby to courtyard. And the smell! The grounds are perfumed with a tropical incense of jasmine, oleander, and citrus, scents that put you in mind of Bangkok rather than Phoenix. And the luxury! When Buffy emerged, beatific, Venus-like, from her deep marble bath, clad in the Biltmore's terry robe, she said, "The incremental pleasure is so much greater than the incremental cost." It would have been folly to disagree.

In the mornings, before game time, we scoured Phoenix and Tucson for museums. Our most beguiling visit was to the Tucson Museum of Art, which incorporates several of the oldest homes downtown; and so the viewer passes through a succession of rooms with sloping ceilings of lath or timber, looking at a collection that begins with pre-Columbian art and moves through the Spanish colonial period—a very different take on American art and history than the one we are accustomed to.

We also made a pilgrimage to Taliesen West, Frank Lloyd Wright's western headquarters, located in the sere hills to the east of Phoenix. An homage to the tastes and views—moral as well as aesthetic—of a great genius, this assemblage of the architect's humble and inventive structures is the center of a sort of cult. A small group of students gather there to live according to Wright principles and to learn how to build Wright buildings. The master himself is spoken of in hushed tones of reverence; one would not be surprised to find his embalmed corpse in the amphitheater.