By John Meunier - Published in the Arizona Republic - March 9, 2008
Most airport book stores have shelves filled with New York Times best sellers by authors with names such as Ludlum, Crichton, Grisham, Follett, Francis, Koontz, that many of us buy to while away the tedium of the next few hours as we surrender ourselves to the passivity required of an airline passenger. Recently some of those bookstores are offering to buy the book back at half price, knowing that it will not have much of a future life on our shelves at home. Occasionally we find ourselves at an airport with a more ambitious bookstore that will have a section labeled “Literature” and considering the purchase of a book that we know will be much more demanding, hence our hesitation, but also could not only find an honored place on our bookshelves at home, it might even extend our understanding of the complexities of human nature or the formal riches of literary art.
In recent months I have found it useful to evoke this experience that so many of us share, when we might choose the less demanding option of “pulp-fiction” or “mass market paperbacks” over that of “literature”, as a way of explaining my sadness and frustration with the caliber of the architecture that is being proposed and built in many parts of Greater Phoenix, but very particularly in my own neighborhood of Paradise Valley. As the previous generation of houses and resorts are being replaced by grander and more luxurious buildings it is clear that the builders are more informed by the architectural culture of “pulp-fiction” than by that of architectural “literature”. During the construction this is particularly clear as the wood framing and the occasional steel column, or the masonry blocks, are transformed into an unpersuasive simulacrum of a massive stone “Tuscan Villa”, a thick-walled “Adobe Pueblo”, a heavily timbered “Hispanic Hacienda”, or even worse a hodge-podge of ideas probably gleaned from a scrapbook of seductive images in the life-style magazines.
As an architectural educator I introduce to my students the notion that our buildings have a cultural responsibility to interpret both our place and our time. Arizona and its buildings are often the subject of my first lecture as we are so fortunate to live in a part of the world that has a particularly rich architectural history, from ancient Hopi villages such as Oraibi, (the oldest continually inhabited community in the whole United States), to civic buildings such as the Burton Barr Municipal Library that drew the world’s attention to the emergence of what has been called the Arizona School, a set of buildings that embody a commitment to both time and place. Frank Lloyd Wright, Paolo Soleri and Al Beadle are just a few of the names of those who have made great architectural contributions in Arizona. And now there is a new generation of architects whose current work is attracting international respect. These are the “authors” of our architectural “literature”. Their work sustains Frank Lloyd Wright’s admonition to tell the truth in our buildings, to realize the potentials of the site without destroying it, to address the challenges and opportunities of our desert climate, and to create a kind of astringent beauty that challenges as well as rewards the eye and the mind. Steel, glass, and concrete have been joined with ancient materials such as rammed earth and native stone, not as stage-set veneers but as essential components of the structure and the expression of the architecture.
Greater Phoenix is poised at a moment of transition into one of the world’s more important urban complexes, much as Chicago was over a century ago. Is it also going to become a major cultural center? We have an opportunity to fulfill that ambition at least in the field of architecture, but only if we resist the easy temptation to build “pulp-fiction”, and seize the opportunity to build an architectural “literature”. This will require a commitment by all our civic, development, institutional, and business communities as well as each of us as individuals and families.
There are already important achievements, building on the heritage of Taliesin West and the Arizona Biltmore, with arts centers in Mesa and Tempe, a football stadium in Glendale, a library, art museum, and science center in Phoenix, some steel and glass condominiums in Scottsdale, fine educational buildings at the universities and the community colleges, and just emerging a unique set of light rail transit stations, as well as a handful of superb modern homes.
Are these going to be swallowed up in a sickly sweet architectural stew of fictional mediocrity, or are we, as a community, going to insist that the buildings of Greater Phoenix have the substance and enduring delight of a literate architecture?
John Meunier
John Meunier is a professor in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at ASU, where he was the Dean of what is now the College of Design from 1987-2002. He is a resident of Paradise Valley, where he joins many others in concern about the quality of the new resort hotels being planned and built there.
