Published in Arizona Highways, July 2008

 

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.”

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