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Tucson, Arizona
Up through spiral staircase, to the higher ground
My time in Arizona started in the rain, a rare event in a desert where an inch of that rain actually caused major flooding and an overall panic. It rained (lightly) the next day in Arcosanti and Taliesin West, but by the morning after that I was far away from the rain and instead a few hours closer to New (and not New) Mexico, just outside Tucson as I tried to fulfill a long standing quest. For reasons I can not fully explain, I have always been fascinated by saguaro cactuses- they're the ones pictured below with the big arms. The first time I had seen one was just two days earlier- it stood on a freeway median, a sight which actually made me laugh. Such a reaction made the three hour, 90 mph truck slalom course drive to Tucson seem like such a good idea.
On an early Sunday morning I drove into the mountains to Saguaro National Park, just west of Tucson to where the saguaros begin to outnumber everything else. That part of the National Park is extremely underdeveloped, there are barely signs let alone pavement. Alone I drove my unlucky rental car up a particularly unattended and deteriorating dirt road, alone in every sense of the word. After twenty minutes through worsening road conditions I picked a spot, got out of my car and started walking alone in an unsettlingly quiet desert, down a recently dried wash that kind of looked like a trail. I followed it for about twenty minutes until I heard... something. I'm not sure what it was, but it definitely was something. In general the all too quiet desert was starting to make me feel a little unnaturally paranoid anyway, Saguaro National Park is home to many friendly creatures from gila monsters to rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas, actual killer bees and even mountain lions. What I heard sounded like a mammal but could have been anything from that bad ass mountain lion all the way to a cute little porcupine or lost or vacationing homeless person. Whatever it was, it made me rethink my plan to walk alone on a hard to follow non trails so far away from anything (or anyone) who could save me from that (probably) vicious (probable) porcupine.
An hour and a half later I was at a Waffle House at an exit in the middle of nowhere, enjoying my scattered and smothered hash browns and requisite waffle, safe from all those saguaros, safe from whatever grunted at me so deep in that otherwise quiet and unforgiving desert.
One saguaro, two saguaro, three saguaro, four. Everywhere you look the hills are alive with (almost) too many to count.
A great sky over a road to nowhere (or more accurately Tucson, although nowhere still counts as a right answer).
I was surprised as to how much I actually liked Phoenix. Maybe it was the consistently good radio, maybe it was the occasionally beautiful mountains in those sprawling all dryvit valleys, maybe it was the rare geographic confluence of both Waffle Houses and In-N-Out Burgers (see any previous Los Angeles slideshow for more on the zen of In-N-Out). I'm sure my opinions would have been different on a 120 degree hot August night, but for a few days in the middle of February, Arizona certainly seemed like a great place to be.
As you probably know by now, I have a limited range of interests. Mountains and National Parks, roller coasters and fast things, Waffle Houses and In-N-Out Burgers, Hockey when it is actually being played, Modern and Contemporary Architecture. Since there is no hockey in the foreseeable future, these slides represent those requisite contemporary architecture images you have come to expect (although oddly not demand) from most of my recent slideshows. Four buildings from three architects, two who are at one with the desert and one (who are really two) who are at home somewhere else.
The Phoenix Art Museum features a completed renovation and an addition under construction by New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the people who designed the best building on West 53rd Street (the American Folk Art Museum, a great building despite its somewhat painful collection). In a part of downtown Phoenix that feels especially suburban, the building doesn't feel out of place but also doesn't go out of its way like almost every other piece of indigenous architecture to prove that it is in the desert. This is an image from a stair landing, not the best but still my favorite, indicative of what to expect but inconclusive enough to keep you guessing.
The building to see in Phoenix (by the architect to see in Phoenix) is definitely Will Bruder's Phoenix Public Library, a block and a half away from the Phoenix Art Museum. Open only a few years, it is supposed to be representative of Monument Valley (a part of Arizona that is at least a five or six hour drive away, farther away than good parts of California and Mexico). This is the view from the library's vast areas of ample parking (day or night), a subtle reminder that parts of downtown probably do not have an especially high land value.
Inside and upstairs at the reading room. To compare and contrast other recent library slideshows, think Rem Koolhaas' gymnastic Seattle Public Library or Will Alsop's tipped over "L" Peckham Library in London (ok, technically it's in Peckham). All go out of their way to make a downtown library interesting (look- yellow!), but of all of them this one seemed the most abandoned. It probably has to do with the fact that no one appeared to really live anywhere near it. Parking lots, drug stores, museums, parking lots, a few industrial buildings and parking lots do not a (real) city make I guess.
Another (possibly) interesting fact. Will Bruder worked under Paolo Soleri (the crazy Arcosanti guy), just as Paolo Solieri worked under Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Lloyd Wright worked under "Form Follows Function" guy and Chicago School legend Louis Sullivan who worked under Frank Furness, the guy who coincidentally designed the iconic (and recently renamed) Furness Library at the University of Pennsylvania. Such a small world.
Downtown Scottsdale is just plain creepy, there's no way around it. The central business district all looks alike, a bit like a ghost town strip mall with lots of souvenirs and golf courses. Saving it from a fate worse than death is an amazing little museum designed by Will Bruder. The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art is worth the trip to Scottsdale, in fact it may even be worth the trip to Arizona, depending on your preferences I guess.
The small museum was designed by Will Bruder, contains rotating exhibitions and two permanent pieces of artwork. One is pictured below, a partially prismatic screen wall designed by glass artist James Carpenter (as if there are any other glass artists but him) and an almost indescribable sky room by James Turrell. Photography wasn't permitted inside, meaning you're just going to have to go out to Arizona yourself if you want to see it from the inside. Highly recommended.
Antoine Predock's museum at the otherwise indistinguishable campus of Arizona State was closed on a Sunday, meaning that yet again it was just me and that guy and his flying bike.
