Gimme Shelter

One day in the early 1890s - a sweltering summer afternoon, most likely - a woman named Margaret Ann Paul hatched a cool idea for improving the adobe home she'd recently bought on North Main Avenue in Tucson: She would wrap a Victorian veranda around it to block the brutal afternoon sun from shining on the walls.

A painstaking reconstruction of that veranda surrounds the house today in its current incarnation as El Presidio Bed & Breakfast. Despite modern air conditioning, owner Patti Toci says the 19th-century porch makes 21stcentury sense, creating a delightful outdoor room in moderate weather and keeping the west-facing rooms cooler on summer afternoons. It also lends the architecture a quality that is less tangible but equally real - a sense of rightful place in the desert.

All desert architecture ought to major in shade, yet most of it doesn't. Since the 1950s, architects and homebuilders have largely battled the summer sun with the brute force of refrigeration rather than the grace of common sense. The good news is that with the increasing concern for conservation and sustainability, architectural shade is making a comeback. Shaded walkways are appearing in downtown Phoenix. Other Arizona cities are commissioning artists to design dramatically shaded transit stops. More architects are deploying shade devices in unconventional and imaginative ways.

The creative use of shade is not yet the signature of Arizona architecture, but some people are asking why it can't be. “Why aren't we copying thesekinds of successes all over the Valley?” The Arizona Republic wondered rhetorically in a 2005 campaign for shade. “The sun must have addled our brains.” The ancient Hohokam people, who farmed this same valley, were not addled. “We know the Hohokam built shade ramadas; we’ve excavated them,” says Todd Bostwick, the city archaeologist for Phoenix. Because the Hohokam did everything outdoors except, presumably, “sleeping and sex,” Bostwick says, the ramadas were essentials of life. Intriguingly, millennium-old Hohokam ramadas look very much like the modern ramadas on the Tohono O’odham Reservation west of Tucson — four or more mesquite-trunk posts embedded in the ground supporting a roof of saguaro ribs or ocotillo stalks. The prime difference is that modern tribal builders sometimes visit the hardware store for wire to secure the ribs in case of wind. This ramada-building technique supports the notion that the O’odham are the direct descendants of the Hohokam, and exemplifies architect Louis Sullivan’s famous principle: “Form ever follows function.” Except it doesn’t always.

1928 Pima County Courthouse in Tucson, and the 1928 Brophy College Preparatory school in Phoenix.

But then came air conditioning — first the 1930s evaporative “swamp coolers,” and two decades later, refrigeration, which ignited Arizona’s population rocket. Shade was all but forgotten in the rush; the force driving Arizona architecture was to invest the young state with an air of prosperity and sophistication. If this meant building the glass boxes that were in vogue everywhere else, refrigerated air was up to the job.

But a few architects, starting in the 1970s, had contrary ideas. In Tucson, Judith Chafee designed a 3,800-square-foot house with an enormous latticed ramada hovering above it. The lattice cast striped shade in summer and admitted winter light to warm the southern façade. The banded shadows on the walls coyly echoed the vertical ribbing of the saguaros surrounding the house. Chafee’s “Ramada House” made a national splash in architecture journals, but tucked away on a secluded street, it stirred no great local interest.

But then came air conditioning, and shade was all but forgotten. When Spanish and then

Anglo settlers began filtering into Arizona, their first responses to the climate were in forms as well-reasoned as those of the Hohokam. The Spaniards and Mexicans built thick-walled adobe houses with interior courtyards that would enjoy shade through most of the day. Anglos introduced the Territorial style, which shaded walls with deep verandas.

The Spanish Colonial Revival style, which stormed across the Southwest after the city of San Diego’s 1915 Panama-California Exposition, was an Anglo romantic fantasy from foundation to cupola, but it contributed delightful shade structures in the form of arcades. These provided not only relief from the heat, but also brilliant contrasts of light and shadow thrown through the arches that became part of the architecture. Excellent examples include the 1917 Ajo town plaza, the

In the 1980s, Robert Frankeberger enveloped a downtown Phoenix pavilion and a Mesa development's visitors center with boldly sculptural wooden laths. The Mesa project, in particular, demonstrated how architecturally powerful a shade device could be. It gathered over the building like the protective wings of a great mother bird, while inside, visitors enjoyed the duality of participating in the desert while feeling sheltered from it. In 1995, Scottsdale, among other Arizona cities, began commissioning artists to design bus stops, and the streets started breaking out in whimsy and panache. Scottsdale's 20 commissions included an elegant Kevin Berry design that looks like a rogue wave looming over a doomed sail. If it isn't exactly desert imagery, it still serves desert bus riders well - the two steel curves cradle them in a cocoon of mottled shade. Of course, these shelters cost more than off-the-shelf street furniture. But Margaret Bruning, associate director of Scottsdale's Public Art Board, puts it nicely: “We can either have transportation infrastructure, or jewels in the streetscape.”

Eddie Jones arrived in

Arizona in 1973 as a young architect fresh out of Oklahoma State University. He joined the venerable Phoenix firm of Lesher & Mahoney, which sent him on a statewide errand to study Native American communities. The firm had government contracts to design reservation housing. What Jones saw on the Papago (now the Tohono O'odham) reservation changed his architectural life.

"The ramadas were the perfect symbol for Sonoran Desert architecture," he says. "Indigenous materials, filtered sunlight, self-ventilating, no moving parts. I think every building I've done since has been a variation on them."

For one Phoenix office building, Jones designed one of those ubiquitous glass boxes, but then swaddled it in a wrap-around lattice of slats made of Trex - the same recycled plastic-and-sawdust planks homeowners use for decks. For another building in Tempe, Jones designed east and west walls with concrete blocks turned on their sides so their voids faced outward, each one forming a miniature window sunken 8 inches deep into the wall, welcoming indirect light but not the dead-on fury of the sun.

Why doesn't every Arizona architect deploy light and shade so creatively? Jones answers diplomatically. "I'm an optimist. People are more and more interested in sustainability, and Phoenix has a lot of smart people. It just has to reach a critical mass where it becomes the thing to do."

That critical mass is already embedded in the Tucson architecture studio Line and Space. Les Wallach, its founder, grew up in the desert mining town of Superior, and his native sense of Arizona's light and heat shaped his design philosophy as much as anything he learned in architecture school. He tries to design every project with a roof area at least 50 percent larger than the building's footprint. The shade creates not only outdoor rooms, but also transition zones that ease the shock of moving from brilliant sunlight to indoor space.

The University of Arizona Poetry Center, opened in October 2007, dramatically demonstrates how Wallach orchestrates shade. Distinctions between indoors and out are blurred. A shaded entry court between two enclosed sections serves to draw people in for a tentative look - "in case they're a little scared of poetry," Wallach says. A wall of 13-foot-high glass doors in the auditorium opens to the courtyard for overflow seating. On the south side, an outdoor odeum is roofed to enjoy shade during summer, while direct sun slips underneath in winter. To the east, a bamboo garden shades a window wall from the morning sun. Deep eaves and miserly windows guard the sunny west side.

It's a complicated building with spaces that have ambiguous qualities depending on the light, the season and the way people are using them. "You couldn't ask for better architecture clients than poets," Wallach says with a smile.

And for architects like these, you couldn't ask for a better place than the Sonoran Desert to create interesting and dramatic buildings. "For some people, the desert climate seems like a constraint," Eddie Jones says. "For me, it's a form-giver. It's a joy to figure out how to deal with the light and heat, and do it differently every time. It's not something to run away from or pretend isn't there. It's a source of inspiration." Al “The ramadas were the perfect symbol for Sonoran Desert architecture.” POETIC PROTOTYPE The University of Arizona's Poetry Center (above) offers a dramatic example of how architects can design buildings to make maximum use of shade. Photograph by Randy Prentice SPANISH INFLUENCE Brophy College Preparatory's arches frame a statue of St. Francis Xavier in front of the 135-foot-high tower of the Brophy Chapel (left), an example of Spanish Colonial architecture. Photograph by Richard Maack