DIFFERENT BY DESIGN

EDITOR'S NOTE: In May 1984, we welcomed Larry Cheek to the pages of Arizona Highways. His story that month, which we billed as an "article about Arizona's storied edifices - from Anasazi to Arcosanti, from Wupatki to Wright" - was a fascinating look at the state's architectural history. Thirty-five years later, we asked Larry to revisit the subject.

When an architect designs a building for Arizona, the problems and opportunities are like nowhere else. First is the landscape, magnificent and angular and dominating and intimidating. What to do - stand up to it, or bow in humility, or coax a metaphor from it? Next is the sun, fierce and relentless. Work with it, or repel it, or try to hide from it? And then there's culture, which cannot be an afterthought in any thoughtful architect's mind. How to create a sense of home, of belonging, in a place where many people have come from somewhere else, and where the state population nearly doubles every 20 years?

Landscape, climate, culture: These are the best lenses for viewing and understanding (and, yes, judging) Arizona's architecture history. It's not nearly as useful to simply tick off historical styles - Territorial, Mission Revival, Midcentury Modern - as it is to see how architects have responded to the unique circumstances of Arizona.

Or haven't responded. Too much of Arizona's built environment looks and acts as if it was intended for somewhere else: mirror-glass high-rises rebounding blinding sunlight into the street; shopping centers ringed by vast, heat-storing asphalt moats. Charles Bowden, the Southwest's most eloquent pessimist, wrote in 1986: "Here the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land." But Frank Lloyd Wright, right here in the pages of Arizona Highways in 1940, laid out a prescription: Architects should learn from "the abstract design inherent in all desert fabric," using dotted-line outlines and wall surfaces "that eagerly take the light and play with it and break it up and render it harmless or drink it in until sunlight blends the building into place with the creation around it."

Wright's unique aesthetic wasn't, and isn't, the only appropriate way to build here: Arizona's landscape, climate and layered cultures are too complex for any one idea to address. And it's that complexity that inspires this architectural tour of Arizona.

Two of these - the Spanish mission of San Xavier del Bac and Wright's Taliesin West - would alight on anyone's Top 10 list of mustsee, bucket-list buildings in Arizona. Most of the rest are not obvious choices and might be unfamiliar to most people. Some are dramatically beautiful, others not easily understood. All are worthy of contemplation. And all are accessible to the public in some form - private homes and office buildings were excluded. Most important, they all say something essential about Arizona, and about how we humans might respectfully carve out our place in this lovely, deceptively fragile land.

BURTON BARR CENTRAL LIBRARY

Phoenix 1995 | William P. Bruder, DWL Architects and Planners

Open daily

602-262-4636

www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org

Must A BUILDING BE BEAUTIFUL to qualify as great architecture? Not if it's a seething cauldron of surprises, provocations and intellectual challenges.

Will Bruder is an architect whose mission is to create a critical mass of architectural encounters for the people who use his buildings. He's been known to install cabinet doorknobs an inch differently on rightand left-opening sides, "to let you experience the tension of asymmetry." In Phoenix's flagship library, one such encounter - on a grand scale - is the celebration of the elevator. It's centered in the lobby and surrounded by a moat, and it slithers up a glass hoistway with all its mechanical entrails gloriously exposed, as if the cables and conduits were part of a post-industrial archaeological dig. Another touch: Where interior concrete columns abut ceiling beams, Bruder has separated the joints at their surface level, so it looks as though there's some invisible magnetic force holding this vast building together.

The library has a decidedly industrial mood, but it's endlessly bursting with intriguing surprises and spaces that trigger emotional responses. Which is what Bruder was pursuing: This library, he's said, is "a realization of my core philosophy: that real architecture exists when both pragmatism and poetry are served with equal passion."

Most big cities have a density, whole districts of architecture teeming with ideas, that generates urban energy. In young, open, sprawling Phoenix, the Central Library alone activated the city's urbanity when it rose almost 25 years ago. It feels like it's still doing the same today.

MISSION SAN XAVIER DEL BAC

Tohono O'odham Nation (near Tucson)

1797 | Ignacio Gaona

Open daily

520-294-2624 | www.sanxaviermission.org

THIS IS THE SPANISH HIGH BAROQUE in full cry: the most elaborate and sophisticated mission church in what now is the United States. The Franciscan missionaries at this far tendril of New Spain intended it to dazzle the indigenous people not only with the majesty of this new God but also with the power of the Spanish crown. It rides the desert with a conqueror's resplendence.

The church follows the familiar European cruciform, or cross-shaped, floor plan with a great dome at the crossing and two 80-foot bell towers on the flanks. Its most exquisite quality is how the The serene and perfect balance of its large-scale forms cools the crazed energy of its decorative detail: Birds, cats, grapes, flowers, saints, angels, geometric carvings and trompe l'oeil designs sizzle relentlessly about the facade and throughout the sanctuary. While its architecture stands as a starkly foreign presence in the Sonoran Desert, its construction is still instructing us in how to make enduring buildings in this land. During one of the mission's many restoration cycles, in 1989, Tucson architect Bob Vint discovered that the modern Portland cement lathered onto the outside walls in an earlier renovation was failing to let the fired adobe bricks underneath "breathe," and they were eroding from the inside out. Vint discovered a traditional Mexican folk remedy: lime and sand plaster, bound with a soup made by boiling prickly pear pads. It was a reminder that the land itself can teach us how to build on it.

LOOKOUT STUDIO

Grand Canyon National Park 1914 | Mary Colter Open daily 928-638-7888 | www.nps.gov/grca SOME OF THE GRAND CANYON'S early buildings were made to look like prehistoric pueblo construction. This one, though, looks like the Canyon itself.

Lookout Studio perches spectacularly on the very lip of the South Rim, offering visitors a terrace and balcony for views into the Canyon. Its walls are composed of large, rubble-like Kaibab limestone boulders, same as the upper Canyon walls, and the window frames' blue paint perfectly matches the deep blue of the sky at this 7,000-foot elevation. It can hardly be said to have any "style" at all: It's the least possible architecture, flowing into and out of its site with such graceful deference that we hardly know it's there — and yet, its apparent simplicity is deceptive. Walk the Rim Trail a few hundred yards to the east, and you might notice that the tower's ragged parapet precisely echoes the form of a great escarpment on the Canyon wall a mile away. When the setting is the Grand Canyon, care is required to perfect such humility.

The studio's generally acknowledged designer was Mary Colter, who worked for Fred Harvey and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway — although one researcher has recently disputed Colter's leading role in designs throughout the West. Regardless, this little building reflects the textures and forms of its site so skillfully that it might serve as a retort to Teddy Roosevelt's famous 1903 speech at the Canyon: “I hope you will not have a building of any kind.... Man cannot improve on it, not a bit.”

TALIESIN WEST

Scottsdale

1938-1959 | Frank Lloyd Wright

Tours by admission daily, except Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas (reservations recommended)

480-860-2700 | www.franklloydwright.org

TALIESIN WEST - the compound that formed Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home, office, school and architectural labora-tory - is one of Wright's finest works and the instructional essay that shows us how to build in the desert. The noted architect Pietro Belluschi said Taliesin West, more than any of Wright's other work, "shows how to grasp the mood of the land and transform it into a place of harmony and beauty." Elizabeth Gordon, who edited Wright's book The House Beauti-ful and was a friend of the Wrights, sensed "a feeling of something almost prehistoric" when she visited. Wright certainly was conscious of reaching back into time to achieve timeless-ness when he conceived it. He installed boulders with prehis-toric Hohokam petroglyphs at strategic intersections in the compound, then wrote in his autobiography that it “belonged to the Arizona desert as though it had stood there during creation.” A grandiose claim, yes, but not an empty boast.

was conscious of reaching back into time to achieve timeless-ness when he conceived it. He installed boulders with prehis-toric Hohokam petroglyphs at strategic intersections in the compound, then wrote in his autobiography that it “belonged to the Arizona desert as though it had stood there during creation.” A grandiose claim, yes, but not an empty boast.

The buildings insinuate themselves into the land in many ways. Most obvious is the texture and slope of the stone-and-concrete walls, an abstraction of the mountainous horizon. The strange, fin-like trusses elbowed over the drafting studio give the place a defensive posture, like the body armor of a horned lizard, but on a winter evening when pink streaks rake the sky overhead, the armor elides into the heavens. The place is end-lessly quirky - the rain gutters in the Wrights' living room run inside, under the ceiling - but one never feels manipulated by architectural theatrics. The structure is as honest as the landscape itself.

With Taliesin West, Wright was demonstrating that a building shouldn't be a refuge from nature; it should be a means to enhance human reaction with nature.

ENVIRONMENT + NATURAL RESOURCES 2

SEVERAL CONTEMPORARY ARIZONA architects have drawn inspiration from canyon landscapes, but the most dramatic is this university science building. Its five-story interior court is a thrilling evocation of a slot canyon on the Colorado Plateau, deploying vertical angle bars along the mezzanine walkways to weave and undulate much like the water-sculpted sandstone canyon walls. Vines dangle here and there from the ramparts, and the sand and stone xeri-scape at the bottom guides rainwater into storage cisterns. A canyon creates an interior world that goes quietly about its business without reference to the outside world, and that is what this building does, too. It creates its own climate and landscape within the interior court, and most of the views from the classroom and offices are directed inward, toward it. It makes sense: When you're studying environmental science, why look out at an urban world of city streets and park-ing garages?

University of Arizona, Tucson 2015 | Richärd and Bauer Open weekdays 520-626-4345 www.environment.arizona.edu

NELSON FINE ARTS CENTER

Arizona State University, Tempe 1989 Antoine Predock Open Tuesdays through Saturdays 480-965-2787 www.asuartmuseum.asu.edu

THE STORYLINE FOR THIS BUILDING,

which grew out of the architect's streamof-consciousness thinking, is strange enough that not many visitors will guess it on their own: Imagine an archaeological cross-section with the remnants of 14th century Hohokam irrigation canals underground and a 20th century ruin, the drive-in movie theater, poking into the sky. Stir in the Spanish concept of naked walls composing a counterpoint of sol y sombra, or “sun and shadow,” and choreograph the entry sequence as an intellectual mystery. (When you finally find the door and entrance lobby, they will be underground.) This is architecture of challenge and adventure, not rational planning. And its nakedness - stark, undecorated masses jostling and colliding in the bare sun; no overhanging eaves, screens or shade structures - stands in vivid contrast to the way most thoughtful architects now are responding to the desert. It wasn't a dumb oversight: Antoine Predock meant it to be uncomfortable outside at times. Look, he said, desert animals don't lounge around in the midday sun; they burrow underground and resurface at dusk. This building suggests that we do likewise. The best architecture doesn't simply provide a place for us to live or work, shop, worship or play. It shows us how to live. This is the lasting lesson of the buildings on this tour.

HELEN S. SCHAEFER BUILDING

University of Arizona Poetry Center, Tucson 2007 | Les Wallach, Line and Space Open Mondays through Saturdays 520-626-3765 | www.poetry.arizona.edu AS AN ARIZONA NATIVE, Tucson architect Les Wallach, who founded the firm Line and Space, has always held a realistic attitude toward the desert sun: Don't try to ignore it, and for sure don't fight it - find ways to live with it. His buildings, exemplified by the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona, always feature lavish expanses of shaded and usable outdoor space. These serve both as gathering places and as transitions to soften the shock of emerging from an air-conditioned building into furious desert sun.

Inside this poetry library, soft and welcoming morning light floods the two-story space, but it's indirect, so as not to threaten the 50,000 books in the stacks. The eastern glass wall leans outward, each window bay leaning a couple of degrees more than its neighbor, so the wall itself becomes a poetic presence. One outdoor plaza serves as a gathering space, while another is a narrow bamboo garden tuned for contemplative reading. The idea is a "progression toward solitude," a hierarchy of emotional spaces as well as graduated levels of refuge from the desert light and heat.

CHASE BANK

Phoenix 1968 | Frank Henry, Weaver and Drover Open Mondays through Saturdays (public access to lobby only) NO SENSIBLE BANK TODAY would spend the money to create a dazzling showcase branch, as Valley National Bank of Arizona did a half-century ago at 44th Street and Camelback Road. Maybe they should: Four months after this branch opened, The Arizona Republic reported that deposits had risen 30 percent over those at the outpost this building replaced. The building now is a Chase Bank branch, but it's essentially unchanged. This is a shotgun wedding of Wrightian geometric expressionism and International Style modernism - an unlikely union, but one that works because a slightly goofy sense of fun chips away at sober rationality (and vice versa), creating a poised and complex balance of personality. It exudes an emotional warmth that few mainstream modernist buildings in the 20th century ever managed. And its superbly executed details reward careful investigation. The concrete mushrooms that make shade outside in the park-like lawn are repeated as columns in the lobby, where they punch through the ceiling, providing deceptively invisible roof support while making way for rings of clerestory windows and lavish daylighting. And check the sly money metaphor: The mushrooms' disc edges replicate the textured edges of dimes and quarters. Remember those? AH