May 2, 2010

Once you have built a wooden boat, or even are contemplating one, it is impossible to walk through a forest and not see boats in the trees. If you are a committed  conservationist, the adult flank of your brain will scold you for these immature and appalling thoughts—killing trees for a self-indulgent toy, the idea!

The guilt stings acutely in the old-growth rain forests of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where Sitka spruce can soar nearly 200 feet and the current record Doug-fir tops out at 281. Your internal Rationalization Department retorts that wooden boats are living things, too, as magnificent and worthy as the trees they come from. This is, of course, poetic romanticization, and may or may not hold water on Judgment Day. Depends on the weight finally given to our conduct within the relationships of life on earth.

I’ve just emerged from a rainforest hike, and I’m picking my way across the logs piled just above tideline on Ruby Beach. This stunningly remote coastline, 90 miles west of Seattle, sees 120 inches of rain in an average year. Routinely overflowing rivers undermine trees and sluice them to the beach, where monster winter surf strips and collates them into surprisingly orderly queues. I’m hardly expecting to see boats in these colossal matchsticks, but one practically leaps at me. A bare, sun-bleached log fragment about the thickness of a human thigh sports a graceful wishbone bend where a large branch had once cantilevered itself off the trunk. The poise of the curve, the graceful rhythm of the grain, even the stringy grass rigging around it, form a perfect abstraction of the 26-foot spidsgatter I admired just yesterday at the Port Townsend marina.

Did a chunk of driftwood like this, three-quarters of a century back, suggest the spidsgatter’s shapely rump to Aage Utzon, its designer? Probably not consciously. Physics provides no direct connection between the hydrodynamics of a hull shape and the cantilevering of a tree branch. But  the human brain seems to supply such  linkages instinctively. The geometry of  nature has prodigious suggestive  power, and frequently we mimic it in  human-designed objects for aesthetic delight or functional advantage, or sometimes both.

There’s something about that name Utzon that’s suggestive, too, but I can’t quite pull it up from darkened memory. When I get home I google it, and another connection between the natural and built environments clicks in. Naval architect Aage Utzon was the father of architect Jørn Utzon, who designed the Sydney Opera House. Little  question that Jørn had seen buildings in his father’s boats.

Wooden boats learn from nature, and if we’re receptive, they pass on the teachings to us. We’re first seduced by what we see simply as grace and elegance in their fluid lines, and in the resplendent tones of well-varnished brightwork. But then, if we look deeply enough, this beauty becomes something more powerful. Something we might call capital-T Truth.

Stay with me; I’m not dipping into the philosophy of aesthetics. I’ve struggled through Kant and Santayana, and I’ll save you the trouble. Those waters are chilly and lifeless. The questions What is beauty? and Why do we need it? are too real and vivid to hand off to theoreticians.

I plucked my stem of understanding from the modern writing of Scott Russell Sanders, a heartland essayist who weaves threads of science, culture and spirit together with dazzling insight. In a piece simply titled “Beauty” Sanders suggested that we find certain objects beautiful because they give us a glimpse of the underlying order of things. “The swirl of a galaxy and the swirl of a [bridal] gown resemble one another not merely by accident, but because they follow the grain of the universe.” Keep going: a bighorn sheep’s horn, a moonsnail’s shell, an ocean whirlpool—these all live in a geometric family headed by that spiral galaxy, a continuous curve of gradually increasing radius. The underlying order is a tough nut even for science to crack, because the density waves that sift stars into a spiral appear to have nothing to do with the cellular growth pattern of a mollusc’s shell. But we instinctively sense their unity, even though it eludes explanation. And we have a craving for order, for forms that fall into  patterns, because they’re reassuring. They tell us that chaos is not the universe’s default mode, that nature is understandable, and we can make a safe and sustainable home within it.

Return to Ruby Beach with me for a minute. The winter storms aren’t yet rolling in, so the architecture of the surf is more beautiful than frightening. Each breaker is unique, which is what makes the surf endlessly fascinating, but all fall within a predictable range. Who’d ever stroll here, or launch a small boat onto a large body of water, if we couldn’t trust the physics, the underlying order, of wave formation? A swell destabilizes into a breaker when it encounters water depth 1.3 times its height. Trusting these numbers, I’ve ventured my kayak into a modest Pacific surf like this on a couple of occasions. I got dumped, but it wasn’t because physics had capriciously decided to suspend the rules.

Since we owe our lives to nature’s dependability, it’s not surprising that we turn there for inspiration in a vast range of the things we create. Often there’s a physical reason for doing so. Plenty of examples in the constellation of boats: A sail is a wing, rotated to the vertical to supply forward thrust in place of lift. And modern Marconi rigs look like wings, because 150 million years of natural selection had already worked out the ideal shape; all we had to do was copy it. (The square sail forms a perfect illustration of missing the lessons of nature; Vikings could have saved themselves centuries of upwind rowing). A tiller, however, which almost invariably curves in a gentle arc, is something else. There’s no scientific mandate for the curve; it just looks right. A satisfying tiller will have the sense of inevitability, as though it had naturally grown that way. Grown like a branch bending to the tug of gravity.

The esteemed biologist Edward O. Wilson invented a word that explains our attraction to the forms of nature: biophilia, which he defined as “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.” Even as babies, we humans tend to be drawn toward living creatures (or their representations) more than to inanimate objects. We’re more likely to develop a relationship with a stuffed bear than a ball. This tendency is embedded deep in the human-instinct circuitry as a matter of survival and reproduction.

So the wooden boat revival was no anomaly. We willingly pour the considerable labor and love into building, maintaining and restoring wooden boats because they lead us to participating in something greater than ourselves. I have nothing against fiberglass, but a boat made entirely out of synthetic material simply reflects human culture back at us. It is purely a product of technology. A wooden boat is a partnership. It’s not literally a living thing, not quite, but it evinces respect for the life that exists outside the clubby circle of human intelligence.

The first sailboat I built, Sam Devlin’s melonseed-inspired Zephyr, sucked me in by its simple beauty. (I also thought it would be simple to build, which was wrong, but that’s another story.) Devlin’s plans promised a sweetly modest little craft of low freeboard, basic, unadorned lines, and just a suggestion of impertinence in her subtly upswept sheer and authoritative stem. As I researched the Zephyr’s ancestry for my book The Year of the Boat, I uncovered a well of affection for the melonseed, which originated as a New Jersey duck-hunting boat in the 1880s. The praise encompassed both the melonseed’s remarkable sailing ability and its beauty, which seemed to impress commentators out of all proportion to the boat’s diminutive 13½  feet. Historian Howard Chapelle called it “remarkably handsome.” Designer Robert Perry praised it as “a symphony of shapes.” Boatbuilder Roger Crawford, who took the lines off an original melonseed and began making fiberglass reproductions in 1989, wrote that his production decision “was based almost entirely on emotion and passion and very little on economics.” As it should be with boats.

I wanted a signature to make my melonseed distinctively beautiful, but I didn’t yet know enough about boat design to venture any substantive departure from Devlin’s plans. Somewhere in the course of construction, though, the idea of a pair of swooping buttresses flowing off the after end of the coaming and landing on the deck took form in my mind and simmered for months. They were frankly inspired by the Ferrari 308 GTB, unarguably one of the half-dozen most beautiful cars of all time.

After I completed the deck and coaming, I bandsawed a pair of trial swoops from leftover cedar and test-fit them. Then for a long 20 minutes I walked around the boat, contemplating from every possible angle. And then I plucked them off and tossed them into the scrap bin. Instead of a tug of regret I felt a flood of relief. It was as though after a long struggle of conscience, I had decided to not commit a sin.

What sin? Superfluous decoration, something that had no functional value on the boat. And something deeper: the grafting of ego onto an object whose intrinsic beauty flowed out of its function. A Ferrari is all about ego; it screams to be noticed. A small daysailer should go about its business quietly and unobtrusively; that is its nature. Trying to transplant the dharma of either machine into the other creates a fundamental conflict, certain to fail.

Michael Ruhlman wrote in Wooden Boats that “The science and beauty were inextricably linked, were perhaps the same thing.” That’s the central teaching of wooden boats: that there is an underlying order, and it should be honored. Materials should not be tortured into forms contrary to their nature (wood generally refuses, anyway). Beauty grows best from the inner character of the object, rather than being imposed on it.

This is why I respond mainly to sail- or human-powered watercraft. Occasionally I see a power boat that strikes me as beautiful, but these are never production sport boats or luxury yachts. The availability of easy horsepower, and too much of it, has corrupted their designs. They’re calculated to impress human sensibility, not nature, and the former is itself corrupt, conditioned by our consumer culture to respond to excess size, power, and bling. A beautiful power boat holds to the same principles as a beautiful sailboat: its form grows out of a desire, if not a physical mandate, to cooperate with nature rather than overwhelm it with brute force.

Beauty resides innately in that desire, and that’s when it becomes the Truth.

I live on a mostly rural island, so my environment comprises mainly natural forms: rocks, trees, deer, great blue heron, water. A quarter-mile from my house is a high bluff where I can look over a strait in Puget Sound. On occasion a certain sun angle coincides with just the right point in the tidal cycle, and a vast curving line appears in the water, the scribble of a mild rip. As simple as it is, it’s strikingly beautiful. It looks like a calligraphic flourish underlining the North Cascades, rising in the distance. One morning as I watched, a sailboat glided into the picture and bisected the line. And it occurred to me that there’s one human-crafted object that will always enhance, rather than spoil, a beautiful natural setting.

In my work as an architecture and urban design critic, I frequently have to leave my island  to visit human-crafted objects, often forty or sixty stories high, in Seattle and other cities. Because my reference is now an island, I’ve become more suspicious of these things, harder to impress even when their design is undeniably expressive and dramatic. It’s not that I want everything to look like sailboats—there’s probably room for only one Sydney Opera House in the world—but that I’m looking for some of that honoring of the natural world in some thoughtful way. And rarely finding it.

What cities are now doing is celebrating our mastery of technology rather than our partnership with nature. Modern office buildings cocoon their occupants in environments where everything from the enclosure of space to the lighting spectrum is artificially controlled. It may be comfortable, but it’s not necessarily healthy or conducive to creativity. I was once standing in the drafting room of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, with its translucent ceiling, when a cloud drifted overhead. The mood of the room suddenly and dramatically changed—and what was wrong with that? When we work in an environment that remains connected to nature, we’re more likely to make creative decisions that respect those connections.

In A Sand County Almanac, the book that sixty years ago finally spilled the word “ecology” into everyday kitchen conversation, Aldo Leopold pleaded eloquently for his fellow humans to return to thinking of ourselves as part of the community of life, rather than as its masters. This requires an acceptance of nature and an appreciation of how the parts all fit together, rather than tireless efforts to manage and transform it. I expect Leopold, who died just before his book was published, would not be encouraged by what he’d observe in the world today: species blinking into extinction at the rate of 72 every day, suburbs oozing carelessly into forest and farmland, energy and natural resources being squandered. Frankly, if he were to paw the burgeoning scrap bin in my boat shop, heaped high with mistakes and misjudgments, he might be appalled at my waste, too.

But when I consider what wooden boats have taught me, the waste seems tolerable. I’ve grown a sharper eye for the beauty of underlying order. A deeper respect for the intrinsic nature of materials. More ability to pare away the self-indulgent and the superfluous to get down to essentials. A willingness to enjoy what’s freely offered—wind and current—rather than craving the power to overcome them. All of these point not just toward more skillful boatbuilding or sailing, but toward better citizenship in the natural world.

The digital revolution recently snuffed the life of the 146-year-old Seattle newspaper for which I wrote a column, and the recession has neatly disposed of most of the rest of my income-producing work. This has not been entirely bad, as it has liberated considerable time for work on the 19-foot sailboat taking shape in my shop.

I’m turning to the boat earlier and earlier every day, like a growing drinking problem,

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

and I’m now suffering work-ethic guilt hangovers: the nagging feeling that I ought to be doing more productive things with my time. Even though the tasks associated with boatbuilding, the sawing, sanding, planing, painting and worrying, look and ache very much like real work, modern culture defines work as labor that produces a paycheck. My strictly amateur boatbuilding doesn’t qualify.

I know I’m not alone in this quandary, so I’m going to wrestle with it here in public. What I want to do is challenge the accepted boundaries of work.

I first realized I might learn about something beyond boats by building them  when I took a two-week course at the Northwest School for Wooden Boat Building. Our instructor, Joe Greenley, was a superb craftsman—his cedar-strip kayaks are seagoing sculptures—but it wasn’t his skill with tools that I absorbed. It was the way his mind would flow straight from problem to solution without letting any emotional muck—irritation, frustration, anger—in between. Greenley never got perturbed over a mistake; he simply set about finding the most efficient fix. He understood intuitively that surges of negative emotion not only interfere with problem-solving; they also get built into the object you’re working on.

The learning curve steepened with the first sailboat I built, a 13½-foot sailing dinghy that I chronicled in my book The Year of the Boat. This pipsqueak boat actually consumed a year and a half, and it delivered the lesson of perseverance.

I was aware before I started that boat projects have a tendency to ooze into infinity, beyond the builder’s life. I had run across an unfinished 27-foot sloop at a Canadian maritime museum, where a sign sparely outlined its history:

Started 1961. Worked on for 40 years. Given to Maritime Centre 2001.

As I worked on my dinghy I learned why. There’s a wavelike emotional geography in the building of any boat: crests of pride and elation to be followed, inevitably, by troughs of despair. These are interspersed with vast doldrums of boredom. The troughs and doldrums carry terrific potential for stalling the project, maybe forever. The solution, I figured out, is first to expect these cycles. By recognizing their inevitability, you take away their power.

The second strategy is to preserve momentum. Novelist Annie Dillard likens writing a book to keeping a feral beast that must be visited daily if the writer is to preserve her mastery over it. “If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.” A boat is exactly like that.

Now I’m in the middle of a larger, much more complicated boat—a three-year project whose ambition contrasts dramatically with the skills of its builder. It’s forcing me to confront my prime character defect, impatience. The only way to compensate for this shortcoming is to forcibly apply patience, no matter how unnatural it feels.

This week’s project, for example, is fairing the hull, which translates to long days of deadly tedious filling and sanding. One of my boatbuilding friends perfectly describes the process as “staring into the dark, gaping, bottomless maw of insanity.”

I devised a strategy to dodge that maw. At the beginning of the week I took a tape measure to the hull and rough-estimated its surface area: 165 square feet. That seemed immense, daunting. But one square foot is easy. It fits neatly inside a human’s close-up field of vision, and an impatient man’s attention span. So I attack one square foot at a time, sanding it to a satisfactory quotient of fairness. Each takes maybe 20 minutes, though I don’t really know—I’ve resolutely avoided timing and averaging. So instead of contemplating a bleak tundra of tedium, I substitute pleasure in completing square-foot swaths of fair, smooth, ready-to-paint surface.

This seems like good practice for the kinds of work that predominate today, where the end product is often so vast and distant from an individual’s daily labor that it’s hard to feel a sense of connection—or care. To remind me, I’ve printed out a profound line from Michael Ruhlman’s House: A Memoir and taped it above the transom:

All great accomplishments are composed entirely of interlocking details.

Attitude, perseverance, patience: No better vehicle than a wooden boat for drilling these qualities, because nothing else presents such a tangible reflection of the way I work on it. If I absorb these values, I’ll enjoy improved fitness for other kinds of work, if ever it reappears. I rest the case for my boat as a course in vocational rehab, or a postgrad seminar in character-building.

Just one problem. This boat has a chance of becoming an object of great beauty and substantial utility. Not all work has that potential. In the real world, frequently we must do jobs of dubious value. Building a boat can ruin us for less important paying work.

Young as it is, downtown Bellevue has a strong imprint in its urban design and architecture: long blocks, plentiful open space, and architectural indifference.

Into this context drops The Bravern, the new strato-zoot shopping/office/ residential complex at Northeast 8th Street and 112th Avenue, without a hint of friction.

The buildings are impeccably tasteful, meticulously detailed, spotlessly inoffensive, and immaculately devoid of quirks or personality. Cynics will crack, “Well, of course, dummy—that’s Bellevue dead-on.” But in fact, there are enough smudges of interesting modern architecture around the edges of Bellevue’s heart to suggest a context for something different, and better.

The 1993 regional library, by Portland’s Zimmer Gunsul Frasca, is both intriguing and beautifully functional, a pairing that eluded Seattle’s Central Library. The 2008 Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center, by Jones & Jones of Seattle, is a stunning retort to the grade-it, pave-it, supersize-it suburban ethic, and an essay in how straight-line modernism can assume a surprisingly organic interaction with the land.

The Bravern’s developers and architects might better have taken some of their cues from these buildings, rather than combing ideas from Paris, London Berlin, Prague, Vienna—28 cities in all, as developer Tom Woodworth explains on the promo video. What’s arisen in Bellevue in the wake of that ambitious world tour is a pastiche that has the feeling of no particular place, but rather a placeless, genteel, utterly predictable tastefulness.

The developers cite “timeless architecture … European inspired … but authentic to the Northwest.” The reality hardly qualifies on any of those fronts, unless “timeless” means that an architectural historian from the 23rd century would have a hard time dating the ruins because the stylistic cues are so ambiguous. And The Bravern seems about as home in the Northwest as the REI flagship store would feel in Dallas.

I should break for a moment and admit to a cultural bias, which unquestionably is coloring my view. The Bravern is unabashedly aimed toward rich people. I am not rich, I don’t appreciate ostentation, and I don’t understand how rich people stay rich if they’re buying $350 shirts at Neiman-Marcus. So this isn’t my milieu. But The Bravern is billing itself as a public gathering place, so it’s fair game for evaluation on that level.

Seattle’s Callison Architecture designed The Bravern’s two mid-rise office towers and retail shops. The complex nods subtly toward Louis Sullivan in its integration of arch forms, complicated cornices, and the great rounded corner of the tower at 8th and 112th. There’s no fussy Sullivanesque ornament, of course. At street level, architecture junkies will note withpleasure the indented bays every 16 feet, embracing planters and elegant stainless-steel wire lattices that each likely cost as much as a Neiman jacket.

NBBJ, another Seattle-based architectural colossus, designed the two 34-story residential towers. They’re the crisp and streamlined siblings of The Bravern family, featuring acres of vertical glass, and the de rigueur bustle of bulges and tucks and nips to articulate the surfaces. They’re perfectly competent and forgettable.

For most of us, the heart of any Bravern experience will be the two-level piazza. It’s pretty and inviting if you appreciate formal, meticulously thought-out spaces, and if it’s not raining. The landscaping is lavish and orderly, an orchestration in terraced planters. Uniformed valets standing at attention underscore the formality, and two supersized outdoor gas fireplaces, burning merrily on a recent 80-degree day, suggest that the current century’s sustainability concerns have eluded Bellevue. Authentic Northwest? What about something to keep the rain off our heads?

The best outdoor space in  the complex looks almost like an afterthought—a narrow secondary stairway leading from 8th Street up to the piazza between the office towers. It twists a bit, so you can’t see exactly where it leads when you start up, and it’s graced with a delicate foot-high bronze fox sculpture, artfully positioned. Here’s the breath of whimsy and unpredictability that the rest of the complex lacks.

Designers of public agoras—parks, plazas, even courtyards—face an admittedly difficult balancing act. People want to feel secure, so spooky, secluded places where trouble can wait in hiding are off the table. But people also crave mystery and discovery, places that don’t reveal themselves all at once, that offer an unpredictable geography of experiences. That’s what’s missing here.

In fact, it’s a doomed errand to launch a 28-city tour of great European agoras to try to bottle and recreate their spirit in the middle of a 60-year-old American suburb, because what makes a Paris or Prague shopping street great are centuries: hundreds of years of layered ideas, styles, textures and mistakes. Such places can’t be forced into existence; they just have to be allowed to happen.

If a modern development outfit wants to create a distinctive shopping center, they’d be smarter to hire a slightly mad genius architect—I am not necessarily endorsing Rem Koolhaas or Frank Gehry—with instructions to not tour any existing place. Or provide an entirely blank canvas and have a dozen different architects each design a piece of it, barely talking to each other.

If the result is a fascinating mess, that’s automatically a better draw than impeccable taste. Bellevue already has more than enough of that.

Published in Arizona Highways, June 2009

Driving up the Catalina Highway on a summer morning, there comes a sudden rockslide of memory: Back to the summer of ’74, where my wife Patty and I are wedged into a minuscule pullout at the side of this same road, our brand-new Fiat roadster wrapping itself in a cloud of steam. It had seemed alluringly romantic, a spirited top-down drive up the big mountain on Tucson’s northern flank, watching the desert scenery blur into piñon-juniper woodland and then alpine forest. But the Fiat is having none of our romance. It will take two more attempts before a cooling-system improvement gets us to the mountaintop without overheating.

But now it is 2009 and everything has changed. The road is wider and luxuriously outfitted with pullouts and guardrails, and the Forest Service charges $5 for the drive. The mountain no longer serves as Tucson’s northern boundary; the city has lapped around it in the shape of a lopsided horseshoe. In 2003 the month-long Aspen Fire scorched 132 square miles of the mountain’s forests. I am no longer as interested in driving up the mountain as in hiking through it. And Fiat no longer sells cars in the United States.

Consider these changes in the context of geologic time, and they seem astonishing. And there are more coming, quickly. The tribe seething around the mountain’s skirts, now more than a million strong, has profoundly altered the mountain’s character. It seems like time to sound an alarm: Civilization is messing with an ecosystem that’s still too complex for us to be able to predict the consequences. But first it’s worth looking at how this mountain has messed with us.

For as long as there’s been recorded history, the Santa Catalina range has represented escape. Most obviously, from the desert heat: In the 1920s, editorial writers for the Tucson Citizen and The Arizona Daily Star pecked out rival editorials pushing, respectively, a paved road and an alpine airport for the mountain. Reluctant voters twice rebuffed $500,000 bond proposals for the highway, and the airport never got off the ground. But in 1933 the Citizen’s publisher, Frank H. Hitchcock, embraced the prospect of prison labor to build the road, and with his influence, work on the 25-mile-long highway began just three months later. The mountain resisted more than anyone expected. By the time the road ended in the ponderosa pines, it had taken 18 years, 8,003 federal prisoners, and even with all that free labor, nearly a million dollars.

A few determined pioneers built a town at the end of the road—Summerhaven, which until the Aspen Fire was a motley scattering of cabins with a year-around population of about 50. It would have grown larger, except that there was only 240 acres of private land, surrounded by Coronado National Forest. (Post-fire, Summerhaven is still tightly contained, but the “cabins” are being replaced by serious haciendas that just happen to be built out of logs. “Some of them have elevators!” an incredulous contractor confided.)

On the lower flanks of the mountain, there’s been nothing to stop Tucson from oozing into the foothills, right up to the National Forest boundary at about 3,500 feet. People who built in these heights won no reprieve from the desert heat, but when I was a reporter in Tucson in the 1970s and controversy was raging over the growing crust of foothills houses, I interviewed a psychologist who suggested people were trying to escape something even more onerous: mortality. “Snuggling up to something permanent,” he said, “seems to offer us a connection to permanence ourselves.” No dummy, he lived in the foothills himself.

As Tucson surges around the mountain, people are now escaping the crush of urbanity. On a perimeter drive around the range—an improvised 92-mile loop that at this point still includes some dirt roads and bullet-ventilated highway signs—I stop at Saddlebrooke Ranch, a new “resort community” that will build out to 5,800 homes. “We’ve got boomers coming out of the woodwork,” sales consultant Frank Caristi tells me. “Most of them are coming for the peace, quiet, serenity, and views of the mountain.”

Although Saddlebrooke Ranch qualifies in spades as urban sprawl—it’s a 35-mile expedition to downtown Tucson—I understand the impulse. The last house I occupied in Tucson squatted in the foothills, on a site as close as I could afford to the mountain’s southern flank. The Catalinas filled the windows, an ineluctable reminder of the towering dominance of nature. This is the most profound thing the big rock provides for Tucson: perspective.

“We do not know who we are until we look at the mountain,” Charles Bowden declared in his ode to the Catalinas, Frog Mountain Blues. I have chewed on that for 20 years, since the book first appeared. It seemed extreme—Bowden always is. Do people in Dallas or Paris not know who they are, lacking a handy mountain for reference? But that book prompted me to begin hiking in the Catalinas, and then I began to understand what a miracle it was to have a mountain bursting out of your city, a mountain in the backyard, a way to understand civilization in its real perspective in nature.

One Sunday at dusk, a Tucsonan named Bill McManus was plodding the Ventana Canyon trail some 1,000 feet above the city when he saw the tawny flash of a golden retriever ahead on the trail. Except that when he closed to about 40 feet, he realized it was not a canine but a cat: a mountain lion.

“I waited for it to run away,” McManus told me. “But it just stood there watching me. I tapped my pole against a rock. It walked off the trail, squatted, as if it was waiting for me to pass. It was acting more like a dog or somebody’s pet than a wild animal.”

McManus said he was fascinated, but when the cat slipped into some tall grass and he couldn’t see it any more, “I got a little worried.” He shouted, rapped on rocks with his hiking stick, and retreated down the mountain—wasting no time, but wisely not running.

McManus’s encounter encapsulated the collision of nature and civilization now occurring on Tucson’s backyard mountain. The big rock inspires us, entertains us, frightens us. In turn, we are remodeling it, sometimes inadvertently, through our presence on it and around it.

The best way to think about a desert mountain is as a “sky island,” an ecosystem dramatically different from its surroundings. There are about 40 ranges tall enough to qualify as islands in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts of the U.S. Southwest and adjoining Mexican states, and the Catalina range, peaking at 9,157 feet, is the third highest. And it’s the only one in Arizona with a major urban area around it.

Ringing the mountain with roads and subdivisions has enormous implications for wildlife. Large mammals, such as bears, mountain lions, bighorn sheep and mule deer, become isolated on their island, with no way to migrate through desert and grassland to other mountains. With shrunken territory and lessened availability of mates, their numbers decline—most dramatically among bighorn sheep, which numbered about 170 in the Catalinas in the 1970s. The last verifiable report, in 2004, counted six.

Climate change, apparently the consequence of an energy-hungry civilization, is profoundly affecting the biology of the island. Bark beetles, encouraged by drought and higher temperatures, are killing increasing swaths of high-elevation forest, principally piñon and ponderosa pines. Some animal species appear to be migrating up the mountain. A Summerhaven store owner told The Arizona Daily Star she’d started seeing roadrunners in the neighborhood—an elevation of 8,200 feet.

Matt Skroch, executive director of the nonprofit Sky Island Alliance, told me in his Tucson office that climate change, more than anything else, is what keeps him up at night, worrying about the mountains. “The species that occur at the highest elevations, where do they go? The spruce-fir habitat supports thousands of species. What happens when that habitat gets pinched off the mountains?”

Biologists are also losing sleep over a seemingly mundane pest—African buffel grass, a tough, knee-high, shrubby exotic that over the past decade has rapidly begun clawing into the foothills of the Sonoran Desert mountains. It’s choking out native species and ferrying fire toward the forests. Probably the only way to challenge it is with massive chemical warfare, which will of course affect the entire ecosystem in unpredictable ways.

This is the short view, and it’s dismaying. But there is a long view, and its spokesman is an articulate Forest Service biologist named Josh Taiz. He grew up at the foot of the Catalinas, majored in evolutionary biology and ecology at the University of Arizona, and now works in a cramped office at the back of the visitors center at Sabino Canyon. Early on a summer morning, we take a little Kawasaki trucklet up to a foothill perch where we can look into Sabino’s yawn and across the craggy face of the Catalinas.

“I’m not sure we can say the Catalinas are ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ because we don’t have a baseline of what constitutes the ‘health’ of the ecosystem,” Taiz says. “Adaptation and natural selection are at work constantly. Certain species will thrive in certain conditions, and in others they won’t. What we’re seeing now is that these biological communities are changing—no question about that. We often automatically tag that as ‘bad.’ It may well be. But when I hear ‘bad,’ I say, ‘maybe.’ Wait and see.”

Taiz sketches a portrait of a mountain ecosystem—really, a network of ecosystems—so complex that it still defies modern science’s ability to predict and explain its behavior. For example, he cites the Aspen Fire, whose vast and obvious destruction has yielded some unexpected benefits for wildlife. “The Mexican spotted owl—intuitively, you would have expected the fire to have devastated it, since it took so much mixed conifer forest. But 2003-04 produced the largest number of young since the early ‘90s.” The apparent reason is that opening up the forest canopy and increasing mulch benefited small mammals. Their numbers boomed, which in turn encouraged their predators: the owls.

We peer across the canyon at the waves of houses lapping against the mountainside. Chipmunks, Taiz notes, thrive in the vicinity of humans. This ripples throughout the food chain. The rodents eat the eggs of ground-nesting birds, which may cause them to decline. Raptors swoop down onto the chipmunks, which may give the big birds a boost. Where it all ends, nobody knows. “Eventually the system takes care of itself,” Taiz says. “Maybe not in our lifetime.”

It’s reassuring that a biologist thinks this. Just as the mountain itself is a reassuring presence. That, in fact, is the core of its importance for the messy carnival of humanity teeming around it. The mountain tells us that as there has been a past, there will be a future; and that our mistakes, in the very long view of nature, might be forgivable.

What happens when an architecture critic designs a house? It’s not quite the same as if a music critic were to attempt the “Emperor” Concerto, or a restaurant critic commandeer Canlis’s kitchen for the night. Those events would be ephemeral, hustled  quickly into past tense if not quite forgotten. I’m living in this house for the rest of my life.

            I’ve nourished a passion for architecture for the last three decades, writing regularly on it for national magazines and newspapers, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for the past four years. I studied architecture history in grad school, but took no hands-on design courses; I never craved to actually practice architecture. This was wise. When I built my sailboat, I noticed that I have an almost immaculate inability to visualize three-dimensional objects from two-dimensional plans. The boat works, but only because I built most of it twice. I have to see something in three dimensions to understand why it doesn’t work, then take it apart and do it over again. This is what I do as architecture critic, just omitting the do-over part.

Great room

            My wife Patty and I began prospecting for Whidbey Island land a couple of years ago. We’ve always wanted to commission an architect-designed house, but every time we got close, financial reality intervened. This time, an architect friend from our years in Arizona made a stunningly generous offer: he’d do the conceptual design for the cost of a plane ride to see the site. Then we could have a local architect develop working drawings at relatively modest cost.

Did I mention reality? I interviewed architects and contractors in the neighborhood, and what I kept hearing was: minimum $250 per square foot, and that’s with Ikea cabinets. Tom Kundig, one of Seattle’s most respected residential architects, recently told me $350 would be more realistic. At the $250 level, a 1600-square-foot house on a $200,000 lot would have totaled $600,000. At that we were well over our budget—we weren’t shopping for a wink-o-matic loan—even without site prep, landscaping, or the inevitable contingencies. Sadly, we shelved our good friend’s offer.

            Why should custom building cost so outrageously? There’s a panoply of underlying issues, but at bottom is the nature of the homebuilding business. Contractors are not artists who thrive on innovation and challenge; they’re tradespeople who want to get the job done and roll rapidly on to the next one. They hate tackling anything they haven’t done before, so if they have to do it, they build in a hefty nuisance surcharge. Modern architecture is a nuisance.

            We found a developer-owned lot we liked, and the builder already had an approved plan for a 1,975-square-foot house that he’d build for substantially less than that theoretical 1,600-footer. It was a conventional Northwest rambler tricked out with ridiculous neo-Craftsman detailing, but it looked like something I could work with. We made a deal: I would redesign it over the existing footprint, then take it back to the original architect for a reality check and new working drawings.

            I bought a T-square and architect’s scale and cleared the dining table. Most architects haven’t drawn on paper for decades, but I wasn’t about to entangle my life in learning CAD (computer-aided design). Over a week that encrusted the floor with a sedimentary layer of eraser crumbs, I stripped the Craftsman clutter off the elevation and added a few contemporary details such as a frameless triangular clerestory, trying to reposition the house somewhere nearer the 21st century. I revised the floor plan to mesh with the life we envisioned. Everything seemed to work, but I couldn’t dismiss the lesson of the sailboat: We wouldn’t really know until the house appeared.

            The architect who’d drawn the original plan was unlike any I’ve dealt with in my writing about architecture: he had pictures of Jesus in his office, but none of buildings. Still, he went to work on my plans with a professional attitude and demonstrated adept problem-solving. He easily untangled a circulation mess I’d created between bath and bedroom, and probably saved us a thousand dollars through the simple expedient of lowering roof pitch. I had slashed and burned frippery to cut costs, but missed the obvious.

            The house arose last spring as we camped in a nearby rental to monitor progress. There came the usual array of surprises, each inevitably ringing up some addition to the bill. I was happily surprised by the builder’s care with quality and detail. The miters on the door and window frames were more accurate than the painstaking joinery I’d committed on my sailboat.

            A week after we moved in, my amateur design errors were brutally obvious. Most were errors of dimension, my failure to accurately envision the functionality, or the feeling, of a space as I drew it on paper. We need 25 percent more window in the east wall of the great room for morning light. The guest bathroom is a foot too narrow. The entry hall is a foot too high. After complaining for years about dumb homebuilders who hang uncovered decks in the Seattle drizzle to go unused nine months of the year, I designed a dumb covered one, too narrow to accommodate four people around a table.

            There’s also a disconnect between the face the house presents to the street and the values I’ve long staked out in my writing. Though stripped of nonsense, the house doesn’t represent what I believe. It still carries the faint whiff of nostalgia, as if it were quietly craving 

 a time-transplant to some Eisenhower-era  suburb. It seems self-consciously cute. There’s  no evident communion with the site. The  southern exposure is squandered as far as  solar energy is concerned.

 In some compensation, the spaces  inside are  far more dramatic and interesting  than the  conventional exterior suggests. If I  ever get  time to build the furniture I’ve envisioned, it could be stunning.

            What’s troubling me most is not any design issue, but our apparent cop-out. There’s a lot wrong with the way we build houses today: too costly, too unsustainable, too inflexible. Our house might have faced these issues—if we’d been willing to throw a lot more time into it, and settle for 500 fewer square feet.

            The other morning, Patty said, “It’s time to quit beating yourself up and enjoy the house.” She’s right, of course; it’s a life skill worth learning.

            What happens as an architecture critic learns to live in a highly imperfect environment of his own making? First, acceptance that there are always tradeoffs. The impulse to perfect our built environment, whether individual or communal, is itself unsustainable. There’s never enough time, money, or intelligence to get it all right. It was laughable to imagine that in a week of work playing architect I could wring a spectacular transformation in this house’s design. In retrospect, I should have cleared the boards and worked on it full-time for six months. But I already had full-time work that I had to keep doing to help pay for the house. If nothing else, I now have more empathy for architects who tell me they had to compromise in the face of budget reality.

            But there’s something deeper. In his superb book The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton suggests that “it is architecture’s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.” And so I begin to see my reflection in the place I call home: imperfect, compromised, at peace.

Published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Jan. 6, 2009

Watching the dizzying phalanx of new high-rises sprouting in downtown Seattle and Bellevue, you’d assume they’re all about economics—betting on maximum return from minimum footprint on ground—and you’d be mostly right. Nietzsche explained the rest: Architecture is the expression of human pride, our triumph over gravity, and the “oratory of power.”

For too many of the towers prickling the Puget Sound sky, that oratory amounts to crude, stentorian bellowing. But developers and architects are learning from these city-killing disasters, and the early 21st century is shaping up as a happier time for skylines. The current crop of towers sports more interesting sculptural shapes, more color, better detailing, and sometimes a friendlier relationship to the person-on-the- street. Favorable developments all.

There persists a nagging worry here that our increasingly dense quivers of skyscrapers may ultimately do more bad than good. Skylines bristling with power look terrific on postcards, but that’s not the same thing as a livable three-dimensional city.

More on this later. First, an appraising roundup of four of the most interesting new high-rises opening just about now:

The near-twin Bellevue Towers are the best pieces in the suburb’s entire skyline, and the most sculpturally ambitious high-rise shapes in either city. The asymmetrical five-sided forms, skewed 22 degrees on axis from each other, guarantee that they’ll never look the same from any two viewpoints on the ground, and there are a wealth of intriguing pleats and tucks in their skins.

Those tucks don’t just relieve visual monotony. They form partially enclosed residential balconies, a deft solution to one of the persistent problems in high-rise residential living. A balcony cantilevered off the side of a skyscraper can feel very much like a 400-foot-high diving board, which is why so many of them are deserted. These Bellevue balconies feel embraced and protected by the building.

The architects confess that these towers actually were designed from the inside out—intriguing floor plans for the residences, which tend toward outlines resembling  Idaho or Nevada, generated the envelopes. That could have been a recipe for chaos, but the designers imposed enough discipline that the towers look busy, but organized.

Good as they are, they still lack the proportional grace of the great skyscrapers of the 1920s, such as the Empire State Building, or locally, the 1929 Seattle Tower. Modern skyscrapers rarely step back, slimming as they rise, which is what we’d like them to do, crowding the sky less and conforming more with our common-sense intuition of how buildings stand up. Today, economics always trumps grace.

Fifteen Twenty-One 2nd Avenue [cq] is the first of the skinny, 400-foot residential towers allowed by Seattle’s 2006 downtown zoning revisions. It’s an experiment, the developer frankly admits, “to see what would work.” It works pretty well as a shape in the sky, remarkably well in its innovative carving of interior space.

Architect Blaine Weber detests “podium” high-rises, where a tower splashes onto a wide, two- to five-story base. A podium wouldn’t have been possible on this tiny, quarter-acre site anyway, but Weber says he believes in marrying the design elements of base, shaft and top to form a cohesive composition. He’s done so in this crisp, clean building, although its top, a subtle but intriguing intersection of blocks and planes, is more interesting than the rather pedestrian ground floor.

The best action takes place inside, where Weber’s magic pleats and popouts, together with the northwest-southeast alignment, has managed to provide an Elliott Bay view from every residence, including those on the “east” side of the building. The balcony issue is neatly resolved with indoor solariums where bifold doors at chest height open glassed-in corners to the sky.

There’s more smart juggling of space on the first five floors, which, although you’d never know it from the street, encloses the parking. The corners, normally wasted space in a garage, are work or hobby studios averaging 200 square feet, available for sale to residents. Actually, this is a podium base—it just doesn’t look or act the part.

The new Four Seasons, 10 floors of boutique hotel and 11 more of very high-end condos, cuts the most urbanistically sophisticated profile of all these buildings. At ground level, the architects have fashioned a useful Netherlands-style “woonerf,” or mixed car-pedestrian plaza, from the truncated west end of Union Street.  In the squared-off U-form of the condo floors, the residences jostle and step with a layered organic quality, almost like a pile of glass blocks arranged by a geometrically precocious child.

It’s a building whose skin expresses what’s going on inside, something that high-rises almost never manage. Although neither these hotel rooms nor the residences are accessible to hoi polloi, the expression activates the street, to everybody’s benefit.

The big disappointment is the routine 5-foot-wide public stairway from 1st Avenue to Western, part of the hotel development. The architects at NBBJ originally envisioned something as dramatic and inviting as Harbor Steps a block to the southeast, but too many complications arose. Too bad: Harbor Steps is the rare and luminous example of a private high-rise development that actually provided useful public space.

Of all these, Olive 8 cuts the clunkiest profile in the skyline. It’s a tall box plunked onto a wide box—a podium. Richard Gluckman, who designed the skin, tried to redeem them with tricky decoration.

Some of the trickery is almost bewitching. That grid of gargantuan  pipes just visible behind frosted glass up to the 17th floor doesn’t actually exist: it’s a masterful trompe l’oeil of fritted glass, a ceramic pattern silkscreened onto the windows. Likewise the canted ovoids in the podium glass, which were not intended to represent olives but in light of the project’s address, might as well. The blue glass fins streaking up the sides are intended as connecting elements to the balcony glass, and they look ridiculous.

The issue of how and whether to decorate a skyscraper has bedeviled architects since the close of the Art Deco era, and this building illustrates the problem. The stripped-down International Style worked best on small buildings; it typically read as deadly tedium on big ones. Playful nonsense such as Philip Johnson’s Chippendale-capped AT&T building of 1984 was like a Monty Python character bursting into a corporate board meeting: fun for once, but you don’t want to see it over and over.

The best decoration for a high-rise is built in, not tacked on. It grows out of a bold, intriguing and thoughtfully detailed sculptural form. The Columbia Center still may be Seattle’s best skyscraper simply because it’s so strong: no other building  expresses attitude, ambition and power so nakedly.

And there we arrive at the question of whether the expression of power has any relationship to quality of life. Developers don’t bother themselves with such questions, and rarely do growth-drunk city councils. The Manhattanization of Seattle and the Dallasizing of Bellevue are good for the civic ego, and for the few who can buy these pieces of the sky to live in, but what else?

It looks like it’s now too late, but what we needed at the beginning of the current skyscraper boom was a radical-populist zoning code that would have required skyscraper developers to give back something of major public value for each new building permit—a civic plaza, say, as substantial as the Harbor Steps.

That might have nipped this boom in the bud. Then again, it might have transformed Seattle into the uniquely wonderful city we keep telling ourselves it is.

WHO BUILT WHAT

Olive 8, 1816 8th Ave., Seattle, hotel and condos

Height: 38 stories

Architects: Mulvanny G2, Bellevue; Gluckman Mayner Architects, New York

Developer: R.C. Hedreen Co., Seattle

Plus: Fritted glass windows create intriguing trompe l’oeil of a grid of giant pipes that doesn’t exist

Minus: Fatuous blue glass fins

Four Seasons, 99 Union Street, Seattle, hotel and condos

Height: 21 stories

Architect: NBBJ, Seattle

Developer: The Seattle Hotel Group LLC

Plus: The tower’s busy skin expresses what’s going on inside

Minus: Afterthought stairway from Union’s end to Western Avenue

Fifteen Twenty-One, 1521 Second Ave., Seattle, condos

Height: 38 stories

Architect: Weber Thompson, Seattle

Developer: Opus Northwest LLC, Minneapolis

Plus: Unique integration of parking and work studios

Minus: Tower meets the sidewalk with a dull thud

Bellevue Towers, NE 4th Street and 106th Avenue, Bellevue, condos

Height: 42/43 stories

Architects: GBD, Portland; Mulvanny G2, Bellevue

Developer: Gerding Edlen, Portland

Plus: Sophisticated and fascinating sculptural form

Minus: Parklet between towers accessible only to residents

“Architects may come and architects may go and never change your point of view,” wrote Paul Simon in a wistful little song titled “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright.” It could be the lamenting anthem for Wright’s students and disciples. No religion could generate a more devout, determined army of followers, but the world has hardly cared.

            It’s their own fault. Instead of adapting Wright’s “organic architecture” ethic, they’ve mostly imitated his aesthetic, producing knockoffs in the master’s idiosyncratic style. They’ve labored outside the design mainstream, their work treasured by devoted clients but scorned by the architectural establishment. Like Wright himself, the fiercest followers have returned that scorn in full.

            The June passing of one of those Wrightians in Seattle calls for a closer and fairer look at his work. Milton Stricker, who apprenticed with Wright in 1951, left Seattle with some good buildings that offer valuable teachings about how to build gracefully in an urban setting. If some of them look eerily like Wright’s own work, that doesn’t negate their value. If we look without prejudice, they might change our point of view.

            Unlike some, Stricker never struggled to break out of the Wrightian orbit. “That was the true religion,” says his son Peter Stricker, also a Seattle architect. “It gave him a direction and a cause and a philosophy.”

            Milton Stricker grew up in Wisconsin—also Wright’s birthplace—in the Depression, abandoned by his parents and raised dirt-poor by his German-speaking grandparents. He worked at the Bremerton Naval Shipyard during the war, then studied architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Disillusioned with the austere Bauhaus vogue, he dropped out in his last year and drove uninvited to Wright’s winter compound in Arizona. Wright told him to go away.

            “Mr. Wright, I drove all the way from Pittsburgh, and I’m down to my last nickel,” Stricker begged. As Peter Stricker relates it, Wright then examined the young man’s hands, learned that he’d spent two years washing dishes and shared the architect’s Wisconsin roots, and accepted him—tuition-free.

            “I think Wright became the father he never had,” Peter Stricker says.

            The deep respect—worship, even—for Wright permeates the three-level Seattle house Stricker designed for himself and his wife, Eunice. It slips into its wooded city lot with self-effacing grace, appearing cottage-sized from the street. Inside, there’s dazzling geometric commotion—until you peer at a plan and realize it’s just a square box, rotated off the street grid and tricked up with small triangular outbreaks for the stairwell and fireplace. It’s skillful sleight-of-hand, a way to wrestle maximum spatial interest out of minimum budget. More magic: from inside, you see trees but no other houses; it feels like a far-flung country retreat. 

            There’s much less Wright style in Stricker’s 1975 Fire Station No. 24 at 401 N. 130th St. —the only overt clue is the prism-shaped slit windows. But this isn’t your basic-box neighborhood firehouse. Stricker also spun it off the grid, providing a path to drive the trucks forward into the apparatus bay instead of backing them in. On 130th Street, the vast copper roof slopes down to meet the passing eye, greatly shrinking the building’s visual mass.

            One fireman said it was the “homiest” Seattle fire station he’d served in, a tribute to its non-industrial warmth. He also noted that it seemed short on storage space, a criticism familiar to anyone who’s ever lived in a Wright house.

            Greg and Pamela Morris’s residence in the Mount Baker neighborhood illustrates how Stricker both emulated and diverged from his teacher. Outside, it doesn’t look like Wright. It’s a tall box with a wraparound deck, a stucco jacket, and only one fussbudget doodad—an outdoor lamp built as a stack of wooden boxes throwing off cantilevered planes—of the kind that Wright passed off as “organic” ornamentation. Stricker was respecting his clients’ tight budget, which Wright rarely did.

            “Good architecture doesn’t have to cost a lot of money,” Stricker told the Morrises, and invested their budget box with details they’ve come to love. Strategic window placement gives the Morrises a view of the Lake Washington sunrise from their bed. An ironing board drops out of a hidden cove in the kitchen wall, allowing ironing with a view.

            Although Stricker listened respectfully to what the Strickers wanted, once he began designing, he didn’t do much collaborating. “He said he ‘wanted input,’ but what it amounted to was we got to pick the bathroom color,” Greg Morris says. “He was a meek, shy person, but when it came to his design, he would not compromise.”

            His son concurs. “He designed a lot of churches, where he had to work with building committees. They’d want to cut off a roof overhang, and he was really committed to that design. He would spend weeks in turmoil and agony.”

            Still, Peter Stricker thinks his father enjoyed a happy life in architecture because he was largely able to practice according to his ideals. He was willing to “fight for them, suffer for them, defend them against a mediocre, materialistic, uninformed society.”

            That’s exactly how Wright loved to position himself. He published a collection of his lectures with the title “Truth Against the World.” The difference, Peter Stricker says, is that Wright’s posture “was a case of arrogance and ego. With my dad, it was just idealistic. He was a purist.”

            Milt Stricker practiced alone, only briefly belonged to the American Institute of Architects—he resigned in disgust at the other members’ pieces that got published—and never won a major public commission. His work, though, blends Wright’s geometric drama and imaginative responses to site with a self-effacing serenity that frequently  eluded his teacher. An architect could do worse, and many have.

[—30—]

Twenty-five structural concrete columns, pocked and scarred and showing every one of their 80 years of ignoble service, paraded through the raw space that Seattle’s R.C. Hedreen Company had targeted for its new offices. What to do? Hiding them between interior walls was out of the question; most of the 10,800 square-foot floor plate wanted to remain open to daylight—increasingly precious within the thickening gang of much taller towers in downtown Seattle. Celebrating the columns would have seemed ludicrous—they were merely clunky, not intriguingly quirky.

So NBBJ interior designers Rysia Suchecka and Anne Cunningham ordered up a single Texas limestone block wall and placed it on strategic exhibit flanking the reception desk and elevator bank. The limestone, like the concrete, was blotched and pitted—but with fossils of ancient shellfish. At some level, everyone who enters the office now absorbs the textural connection between the dilapidated concrete and the dazzling limestone, and begins to understand the former as an artifact of culture, paralleling the latter as a record of evolutionary biology.

“I feel like I’m walking around in something between a brand-new facility and a ruin,” says a delighted Dick Hedreen, company founder and principal.

“He never said, ‘Make it a backdrop for art,’” Suchecka says. “He just said, “Make it elegant, subtle, restrained, a place where it feels good to be.” Those specifications, however, formed a natural invitation for substantial pieces of Hedreen’s personal collection, which includes works by Rauschenberg and Stella. Eleven big pieces now grace the company headquarters.

The seven executive offices line the perimeter of the floor on two sides, and they’re designed with meticulous attention to light and detail. To preserve privacy from eyes on the street below, the designers printed swarms of overlapping Hedreen insignias on the lower portion of the outside windows. Higher up, the swarms thin and finally evaporate into full transparency. The inside wall of each office is a pair of 10-foot-high sliding glass partitions, one transparent, one frosted, that move to fine-tune the occupant’s desired degree of privacy. Above the partitions, interior clerestory windows insure that every last lumen of daylight sweeps through the offices and into the interior work zones. The offices’ bronze door pulls are particularly designed to give tactile pleasure; Suchecka and Cunningham even commissioned U.S. Starcraft to produce a mockup, then fine-tuned it with assorted-sized human hands.

More felicitous details: The designers preserved the building’s 1927 gravity-fed mail chute, complete with bronze slot, as a vertical element beside the elevator bank. Where a felt-clad wall turns a corner, the designers specified a slim, floor-to-ceiling metal blade inset at a 135-degree angle so that passing shoulders wouldn’t eventually rub the felt into shabby disrepair. The executive offices all incorporate custom-designed walnut-veneered work wall boxes and built-in bookcases, and their free-standing oval tables are a generous 34 inches deep, providing space for a sprawl of architectural drawings and documents.

And then there’s the big picture—the feel of the space, engendered by NBBJ’s manipulation of very simple geometric elements. Everything is severely rectilinear; it’s all long, narrow planes, slabs and volumes, and there’s an underlying visual tension between fierce vertical and determined horizontal thrusts. The door pulls punch vertically as powerfully as the credenzas sprawl horizontally. Because the energy seems absolutely balanced in both directions, the overarching sensation is one of serenity. The forces are in repose. The architecture quietly recedes, leaving the art to provide the sizzle.

It seems significant, though, that every guest’s and employee’s arrival and departure inevitably encounters that 18-foot-long limestone wall. There’s no art displayed on it, nothing at all except a modestly sized company logo. It’s all about the stone itself, its texture, history, gravity, and the delight of discovering unexpected detail. An enterprise looking for an architectural metaphor for itself could hardly ask for more.

ne day in the early 1890s—a sweltering summer afternoon, most likely—a woman named Margaret Ann Paul hatched a cool idea for improving the adobe home she had recently bought on Tucson’s North Main Avenue: wrap a Victorian veranda around it to block the brutal afternoon sun from the walls.

A painstaking reconstruction of that veranda surrounds the house today in its current incarnation as El Presidio Bed & Breakfast. Despite modern air conditioning, owner Patti Toci says the 19th-century porch makes 21st-century sense, creating a delightful outdoor room in moderate weather and keeping the west-facing rooms cool on summer afternoons. It also lends the architecture a quality that is less tangible but equally real: a sense of rightful place in the desert.

All desert architecture ought to major in shade, yet most of it doesn’t. Since the 1950s, architects and homebuilders have largely battled the summer sun with the brute force of refrigeration rather than the grace of common sense. The good news is that with the increasing concern for conservation and sustainability, architectural shade is making a comeback. Shaded walkways are appearing in downtown Phoenix. Cities are commissioning artists to design dramatically shaded transit stops. More architects are deploying shade devices in unconventional and imaginative ways. It’s not yet the signature of Arizona architecture, but some people are asking why it can’t be. “Why aren’t we copying these kinds of successes all over the Valley?” rhetorically wondered The Arizona Republic in a 2005 campaign for shade. “The sun must have addled our brains.”

The prehistoric Hohokam who farmed this same valley were not addled. “We know the Hohokam built shade ramadas; we’ve excavated them,” says Phoenix City Archaeologist Todd Bostwick. Since the Hohokam did everything outdoors except, presumably, “sleeping and sex,” Bostwick says, the ramadas were essentials of life.

Intriguingly, millennium-old Hohokam ramadas look very much like the modern ramadas on the Tohono O’odham Reservation west of Tucson: four or more mesquite-trunk posts imbedded in the ground support a roof of saguaro ribs. The prime difference is that modern tribal builders sometimes visit the hardware store for wire to secure the ribs in case of wind. It’s more evidence that the O’odham are the direct descendants of the Hohokam, and support for Louis Sullivan’s famous principle: “Form ever follows function.”

xcept it doesn’t, always. When Spanish and then Anglo settlers began filtering into Arizona, their first responses to the climate were in forms as well-reasoned as those of the Hohokam. The Spaniards and Mexicans built thick-walled adobe houses with interior courtyards that would enjoy shade through most of the day. Anglos introduced the Territorial style, which shaded walls with deep verandas.

The Spanish Colonial Revival, which stormed across the Southwest after San Diego’s 1915 Panama-California Exposition, was an Anglo romantic fantasy from foundation to cupola, but it contributed delightful shade structures in the form of arcades. These not only provided relief from the heat; the brilliant contrasts of light and shadow thrown through the arches also became part of the architecture. Excellent examples include the 1917 Ajo town plaza, the 1928 Pima County Courthouse in Tucson, and the 1928 Brophy College Preparatory School in Phoenix.

But then came air conditioning—first the 1930s evaporative “swamp coolers,” and two decades later refrigeration, which ignited Arizona’s population rocket. Shade was all but forgotten in the rush; the force driving Arizona architecture was to invest the young state with the air of prosperity and sophistication. If this meant building the glass boxes that were in vogue everywhere else, refrigerated air was up to the job.

But a few architects, starting in the 1970s, had contrary ideas. In Tucson, Judith Chafee designed a 3,800 square-foot house with an enormous latticed ramada hovering overhead. It cast striped shade in summer and admitted winter light to warm the southern façade. The banded shadows on the walls coyly echoed the vertical ribbing of the saguaros surrounding the house. Chafee’s Ramada House made a national splash in architects’ journals, but tucked away on a secluded street, it stirred no great local interest.

In the 1980s, Robert Frankeberger enveloped a downtown Phoenix pavilion and a Mesa development’s visitor center with boldly sculptural wooden laths. The Mesa project in particular demonstrated what powerful architecture a shade device could be. It gathered over the building like the protective wings of a great mother bird, while inside, visitors enjoyed the duality of participating in the desert while still feeling sheltered from it.

In 1995, Scottsdale, among other Arizona cities, began commissioning artists to design bus stops, and the streets began breaking out in whimsy and panache. Scottsdale’s 20 commissions included an elegant Kevin Berry design that looks like a rogue wave looming over a doomed sail. If it isn’t exactly desert imagery, it still serves desert bus riders well—the two steel curves cradle them in a cocoon of mottled shade. Of course these shelters cost more than off-the-shelf street furniture. But Margaret Bruning, associate director of Scottsdale Public Art, puts it nicely: “We can either have transportation infrastructure, or jewels in the streetscape.” 

ddie Jones arrived in Arizona in 1973 as a young architect fresh out of Oklahoma State University. He joined the venerable Phoenix firm of Lesher & Mahoney, which sent him on a statewide errand to study Native American communities. The firm had government contracts to design reservation housing. What Jones saw on the Papago (now Tohono O’odham) reservation changed his architectural life.

“The ramadas were the perfect symbol for Sonoran Desert architecture,” he says. “Indigenous materials, filtered sunlight, self-ventilating, no moving parts. I think every building I’ve done since has been a variation on them.”

For one Phoenix office building, Jones designed one of those ubiquitous glass boxes, but then swaddled it in a wraparound lattice of Trex slats—the same recycled plastic-and-sawdust planks homeowners use for decks. For another in Tempe, Jones designed east and west walls with concrete blocks turned on their sides so their voids faced outward, each one forming a miniature window sunken eight inches deep into the wall, welcoming indirect light but not the dead-on fury of the sun.

Why doesn’t every Arizona architect deploy shade so creatively? Jones answers diplomatically. “I’m an optimist. People are more and more interested in sustainability, and Phoenix has a lot of smart people. It’s just got to reach a critical mass where it becomes the thing to do.”

That critical mass is already imbedded in the Tucson studio Line and Space. Les Wallach, its founder, grew up in the desert mining town of Superior, and his native sense of Arizona’s light and heat shaped his design philosophy as much as anything he learned in architecture school. He tries to design every project with a roof area at least 50 percent larger than the building’s footprint. The shade not only creates outdoor rooms, but also transition zones that ease the shock of moving from brilliant sunlight to indoor space.

The new University of Arizona Poetry Center, opened just last October, [2007] dramatically demonstrates how Wallach orchestrates shade. Distinctions between indoors and out are blurred. A shaded entry court between two enclosed sections serves to draw people in for a tentative look “in case they’re a little scared of poetry,” Wallach says. A wall of 13-foot-high glass doors in the auditorium opens to the court for overflow seating. On the south side, an outdoor odeum is roofed to enjoy shade during summer, while direct sun slips underneath in winter. To the east, a bamboo garden shades a window wall from the morning sun. The sunny west side is guarded by deep eaves and miserly windows.

It’s a complicated building with spaces that have ambiguous qualities depending on the light, the season, and the way people are using them. “You couldn’t ask for better architecture clients than poets,” Wallach says.

And for architects like these, you couldn’t ask for a better place than the Sonoran Desert to create interesting and dramatic buildings. “For some people, the desert climate seems like a constraint,” says Jones. “For me, it’s a form-giver. It’s a joy to figure out how to deal with the light and heat, and do it differently every time. It’s not something to run away from or pretend it isn’t there. It’s a source of inspiration.”