Dennis Numkena: Building on an Anasazi Heritage

Imagine the surprise an aboriginal traveler in the Sonoran Desertmust have felt when he came acrossthe elegant structures built by theAnasazi Indians tucked away insome hidden cleft in an otherwiseunassuming stretch of desert. That same sense of wonder mighteasily strike the modern wayfarerwhen, after trekking through aridmiles of Phoenix's franchise stores,shopping centers, and tract homes,he suddenly encounters a veritableAnasazi architectural vision risingout of the cityscape. All curves and arches and stepsclimb toward the clouds, a clay-redcluster of buildings four stories highechoes the line of the distant bluemountains that form its backdrop.

Hopi architect Dennis Numkenacreated the design concept fordeveloper David R. Johns' structure at the corner of Tatum Boulevard and Cactus Road. It's calledThe Anasazi Resort. Numkena's inspiration: the ancient Indianpueblo ruins at Chaco Canyon,New Mexico. The adobe-likestructures have arched breeze-ways sheltering apartments incool passages much as the naturalarchways in canyon walls shadethe old cliff dwellings. "This is the only project I'vebeen on that has pushed me to theutmost of my capability. It's mybest work because I was workingunder the gun. The client expectedexcellence." When construction is completed, the Anasazi complexwill include condominiums andrental apartments, office and retailspace, and a curvilinear resort hoteloverlooking a golf course and apanorama of low mountains inthe distance. One of the first Native Americans in the Southwest to foundhis own architectural firm, Dennis Numkena is also a gifted artist who applies his Hopi heritage to all his work. "There is no contemporary statement of Indian architecture in Arizona," he says. "The high point of Indian architecture occurred in the 1300s. There's a strength of possession and drama about that work that doesn't exist in today's buildings." Born and partly brought up on the Hopi reservation near Tuba City, in northern Arizona, Numkena was sent to study at the Phoenix Indian School but grew restless and bored with the cur-riculum. He ran away in his soph-omore year and was later taken in by an Anglo family and enrolled at Scottsdale High School. "Amazingly, I passed the exams to go back East and study at Severn Boys' School, the prep school for the U.S. Naval Academy."

Before long, though, Numkena realized he was not inclined toward a military career. Gifted in science and math, he became a computer programmer and lived for a time in New York City, where building forms made such an impression on him he decided to become an architect.

After graduating from Arizona State University's College of Architecture, "I arbitrarily decided to practice on Indian reservations, mostly in the Southwest." But it was a difficult apprenticeship. "You cannot realize your art on the reservation," Numkena reflectsbecause of the federal government's involvement. Indian architecture died years ago because of govern-ment interference." In spite of bureaucrats' opinions that his plans were different, expen-sive, and difficult to understand, Numkena's buildings reflect the spirit of his Indian ancestry. His Yavapai Apache Cultural Center, near Montezuma's Castle (Middle Verde Road at Interstate 17) is modern with blunt geometrics and slanting adobe-colored walls suggesting the Sinagua cliff dwellings hidden in the canyon behind it.

In 1974, Numkena took up painting, and recently he has come intohis own as an artist. A 1983 sell-out show at Scottsdale's von Grabill Anasazi Resort in Phoenix. "Architecture has been an impor-tant part of his life," says galleryowner Charles von Grabill, "butthe pendulum is swinging. Now abig part of his life is his art." Numkena has made the monotypethe medium of his special success. Numkena infuses his abstractmonotypes with earth tones andbrilliant, startling hues. Indianthemes pervade all his pictures. Amember of the Hopi Snake Clan,he often includes representationsof friendly snakes. Folk tales recalledfrom his childhood occasionallysurface in his paintings. The pic-tures have a quality of memory anddream, for much of the artist'sexperience on the reservation tookplace during his early youth. RoofDancers shows a group of Indiandancers atop a pueblo which soarshigher than in life, as though it wereseen from the perspective of asmall child. In 1977, Director John StonePorter commissioned Numkena todesign the set for Arizona StateUniversity's production of Mozart'sfantasy opera The Magic Flute,making him "the first Native Ameri-can ever to design scenery for anopera," he says. Critics describedthe spectacular result as "outstand-ing" and as "a barrage of color andsurrealism." The show was revivedin 1982 for broadcast on publictelevision. Another opera set is inthe works, Numkena's feeling that "Anasaziwere my predecessors" influenceshis art and his architecture. He goesback to the ancient ruins and stud-ies the sites, contemplating what thelong-ago builders' next move mighthave been. "One of these days," hesays, "I hope to create a level ofarchitecture that should have beentheirs had they continued. "The ruins speak to me in a veryspiritual way," he reflects. "I feelcomfortable there. When I leavenorthern Arizona, I'm anxious to getback to do more work, designing oncanvas and painting. It's like a process of learning, almost as thoughthe spirits were speaking."

Pioneering Mexicans who were filtering northward. J. Ross Browne, who passed (as quickly as possible) through Tucson in 1864, left us this gringo's-eye description: “...a city of mud boxes, dingy and dilapidated, cracked and baked into a composite of dust and filth...barren of verdure, parched, naked, and grimly desolate in the glare of a southern sun.” A precious few of those mud boxes, restored and sometimes (inaccurately) stuccoed and painted in gay pinks and oranges, remain in Tucson's Barrio Historico and El Presidio neighborhoods. No longer despised, some architects look to them for inspiration, feeling that the twenty-inch-thick adobe walls, deeply inset windows, and modest courtyards are offering lessons about how people should live in this land.

The Victorian costume party

Victorian architecture was basic braggadocio. It was whimsically exotic, cocky, grandiloquent, picturesque, and sentimental. It was a costume party of turrets, cupolas, arches, columns, decorative gee-whiz, and archeological piracy. It was optimistic; it was irrelevant. Victorian architecture celebrated the blithe and boundless confidence of the era.

It was a party Arizonans nearly missed. We kept building our mud boxes-we had no materials to do otherwise-until 1880, when the railroads finally began to punch through. Behind them swept a tidal wave of Victorian expression. The Anglos, at least, couldn't wait to abandon adobe. Adobe was Mexican. Bricks and banisters were the building blocks of an expanding America. The editor of the Arizona Weekly Enterprise, a Florence newspaper, said it all in an 1887 editorial: “The adobe does not make an attractive or a clean building, and Eastern people find it somewhat repulsive in appearance.... It is hoped that all new building of any pretensions will be built of brick and the unsightly adobe discarded.” It was. But a funny thing happened on the way to civilization. Because this was still a frontier, its supply lines unstable, Arizona's Victorian architecture tended to be a bit clumsy, a bit timid-and because of that, enormously poignant.

Consider the Joseph Muheim House (1902) of Bisbee. It is a modest one-story clapboard bungalow, but erupting from its living room is, of all things, a Queen Anne tower and cupola.

In Florence, the William Clarke House (1884) is an elaborate two-story Italianate-made of adobe. The railroad never made it to Florence.

Jerome is the best testament of all to the Arizona pioneers' determination. Not only are there wooden Victorian houses, but also fashionable turn-of-the-century cast-iron neoclassical storefronts bearing Los Angeles datelines. They had to be shipped into Arizona on the Santa Fe main line, transferred to the narrow-gage United Verde and Pacific Railroad, which wound through 186 curves in twenty-six mountainous miles, and packed onto a mule wagon at the depot for a ride-usually described in historical accounts as “harrowing”-several more miles into Jerome.

And in the older sections of Prescott, a town originally settled by New Englanders during the mid-1800s, whole neighborhoods sport nothing but beautifully restored Victorian homes.

Perhaps the single most astonishing Victorian building in America is the Flake mansion in tiny Snowflake, atop the Mogollon Rim. The three-story home has sixteen rooms, and even a widow's walk.

Even the flatlanders of Phoenix had to make concessions. The best Victorian house in Arizona is the Rosson House (1895), a magnificent Eastlake-style lady of wildly contrasting textures and lacy balustrades, designed by A. P. Pettit, an architect from Los Angeles. It seems like a perfect expression of Victorian extravagance-until you look closely. Each room is finished with a different pattern of parquet flooring, but for one. The last is paved with the offcuts of all the others. In early Arizona, the materials of civilized architecture were too precious to squander in the pursuit of perfection.

Mediterranean designs have influenced Arizona architects since the late 1700s when Spanish missionaries began building San Xavier del Bac. (ABOVE) Spanish ironwork and woodcarving ornament the doors of the missions San Xavier and Tumacacori. James Tallon photos (BELOW) The Continental Bank Plaza in Scottsdale reflects Spanish Colonial and Mediterranean styles with arches, interior courtyards, and a mission bell tower. Architects: Varney, Sexton and Sydnor Associates, Phoenix. Gill Kenny photo

The Spanish accent

Spanish architecture returned at the turn of the century, a California import routed through, of all places, Chicago. In 1893, Chicago hosted the Columbian Exposition, a world's fair. Most of the fair's buildings were dressed in neoclassicism, but flaky California showed up with an imitation Spanish mission. That one building started an architectural stampede in the West, which had been itching for a way to declare independence from the Eastern design establishment.

A young man named Henry Trost introduced the Mission Revival to Arizona. Trost, who had worked in Chicago as a draftsman during the exposition, moved to Tucson in 1899 and immediately won a commission for an Owls Club on Main Street, then the town's most fashionable address. The gorgeous building he produced is now known as the Steinfeld Mansion.

Rather than design in academically correct mission style, as the California architects were doing, Trost borrowed some Spanish ideas, like the courtyard enclosed on three sides; pinned on some mission doodads, like the scalloped gable; and crowned it with plaster tracery straight from the Chicago of Louis Sullivan! It was a mongrel, but it functioned in a way fundamentally comfortable to Anglos while promising to enrich its occupants' lives with harmonics of Spanish romanticism.

In 1915, another world's fair, this time in San Diego, spelled the Mission Revival's end. In its place came something more decorative, more flamboyant, even more shamelessly romanticized. The Spanish Colonial Revival sought to recreate the grand life of the dons and viceroys who had ruled their colonial holdings from pink stucco haciendas with the rhythmic arcades and richly tiled domes and Islamic courtyards. A splendid ideaand one based on a monstrous fib, for neither that architecture nor life-style ever existed anywhere in the North American West.

But this bald-faced fabrication left Arizona with some of its most beautiful buildings. In Tucson are the Veterans Administration Hospital of 1927, the Pima County Courthouse of 1928, and the Benedictine Sanctuary of Perpetual Adoration of 1940. Each is a composition that seems almost symphonic in its rhythm and complexity, and each is a monument to the romantic spirit.

In Phoenix, which has never embraced Hispanic historicism with quite Tucson's fervor, the revival mingled with other styles of the time, yielding intriguing hybrids. In the Luhrs Tower of 1929, Henry Trost gave the city a delightful fifteen-story Art Deco/Moderne form embellished with Spanish Colonial motifs a kind of ethnic reversal of what he had done in the Tucson Owls Club. First Baptist Church, built the same year, is a thoroughly improbable fusion of Gothic Revival and Spanish Colonial. What was happening was a cultural balancing act: in the boom of the 1920s, Phoenix craved to begin looking like a grown-up American city, but it didn't want to be just a Tulsa with mountains. It needed a faint whiff of exoticism about it, and this slight Spanish accent was the key.

The Spanish Colonial Revival ended by 1940, but its clichés-arch, bell tower, mis-sion tile roof, and courtyard-live on. In the 1980s, subdivisions, shopping centers, and even whole towns still are being built in a simplified, tack-on Spanish style. Tucson anthropologist James S. Griffith has a theory: "This leads one into dangerous areas of cocktail-party cultural analysis," he cautions, "but the whole North American attitude toward Hispanic and Mediterranean culture has always been one of romanticization and stereotyping. Maybe this architecture is your chance to project yourself into a feudal society, not as a peón, but as a patrón, surrounded by courteous servants, hats in hand, saying, 'would you like to ride the palomino today, señor?'"