ARIZONIQUES

A Guide to Places, Events, and People Patriots Square

A city, like a household, needs conversation pieces. The newest one in Phoenix is Patriots Square, a downtown park that has opened in a crossfire of cheers and catcalls.

A controversial park? Indeed. One headline termed it a "space odd-ity," and a columnist called for laser beams to be fired at the park, vaporizing it. But another praised it as "architecturally exciting, innova-tive, and creative beyond anything yet attempted in Phoenix," reminding readers that the Eiffel Tower at first suffered ridicule, too.

The theme of the park, designed by Phoenix architect Ted Alexander, is colliding circles. Circular brick planters and benches bite into circles enclosing grassy knolls, and all these surround a semicircular amphitheater. The framework of a steel and fabric dome looms like a five-legged spider over the amphitheater, providing partial shade. A 115-foot-high spire rises from the dome, with ringed light globes leapfrogging into the sky. Why circles? For one thing, they seem to tease and upbraid the stern right-angled buildings and streets surrounding the park, like court jesters invading a board meeting.

Alexander also sees them as "friendly" geometric forms-easy to approach and touch, easy to wander among.

A do-it-yourself laser beam, also controversial, is scheduled to be installed in the spire later this year. For the price of a quarter or two, people will be able to command a control panel and paint the night sky with a beam visible several miles away. It will be a landmark for Phoenix-and the world's largest video game.

Unique to Arizona and the Southwest. Space Visitors

Few of us will ever board a space shuttle to explore the mysteries of space firsthand. But a visit to Arizona State University's Center for Meteor-ite Studies may be the next best thing. The center's collection of meteorites-mineral chunks that have fallen to earth from interplanetary space-is surpassed in size only by those of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution.

The university founded the collection in 1959 with the purchase of 578 meteorites from Dr. H. H. Nininger, who had a museum in Sedona. Since then, additions have brought the number of specimens to 1,300.

The largest piece in the collection is the 70-pound Hugoton, Kansas, meteorite, uncovered in 1927 by a boy plowing a field. Other important objects are fragments from Mexico's Allende meteorite, Australia's Murchison meteorite, and France's Orgueil meteorite. About a ton of material from the cosmic body that formed Meteor Crater in northeast Arizona also resides here.

Dr. Carleton Moore, the center's director, says about two meteorites larger than a baseball fall in Arizona each year. Since this has been going on for millions of years, every square mile of the state may have at least one meteorite, waiting to be found. Indeed, each year campers and hikers bring 300 to 400 unusual rocks to the center. "Finding meteorites is one of the last areas in science where