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Posted May 17, 2009, 10:42 PM
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Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: Country Club Park, Greater Coronado, Midtown, Phoenix, Az
Posts: 4,610
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Not really news/development, but its nice to see the Republic talking about architecture and doing it through the lents of the rail:
http://www.azcentral.com/thingstodo/...trail0517.html
Quote:
New rail, new view of architecture
From Metro, Valley takes on a different look
1 comment by Richard Nilsen - May. 15, 2009 01:08 AM
The Arizona Republic
The best way to take the architectural pulse of the city is to slice it crosswise, open it up and peek inside.
Light rail architecture tour
Public art along the light rail
Buildings to watch for along the rail
There's a lot to see riding the light rail from end to end. Paying attention is the main thing. Look at everything you can and pick your most and least favorites.
Here are five buildings to watch for, one from each of the five legs of the light-rail route:
• 19th Avenue leg - Arizona Federal Credit Union, 5151 N. 19th Ave., Phoenix. A circular, upside-down pyramid, it's one of three upside-down pyramids in the Valley. Such buildings shade themselves.
• Central Corridor - Phoenix Financial Center, 3443 N. Central Ave. This is the noted "Punch-Card Building," which has two circular satellite buildings at its foot. It's one of the most distinctive buildings in the Valley.
• Washington Street leg - Auto repair shop, 1514 E. Washington St., Phoenix. This tiny shop has been painted with a blue front, a yellow frieze that reads "Full Auto Repair" and sunrise rays at the peak.
• Tempe leg - Convenience store, 1148 S. Terrace Road, Tempe. This relic of the past is one of the few remaining stores of the original 1950s design for the first Circle Ks in Arizona.
• Mesa leg - Watson's Flowers, 2425 E. Apache Blvd., Tempe. This simple Art Deco building, with its wonderful glass-block windows and curved facade, is a simple but elegant remainder from the Valley's architectural past.
- Richard Nilsen
And the best way to do that is to ride the light rail from end to end. It's a Gray Line tour, without the annoying tour guide.
It's a chance to see your city again for the first time. You sit in your seat and gawk out the window as the city passes, too fast to focus on a single building for long but perfect to soak in a general impression of the city.
For what makes up a city is the aggregate, not the individual buildings. Too often, when we write or talk about architecture, we look at an isolated building here or there, as if they were works of art in frames, separately considered, with no relation to what surrounds it.
But that isn't how we actually experience architecture. Instead, we live in it, walk through it, breathe its air-conditioning, seek its shade. We move from one building to the next, drive to a third and work in a fourth. The architecture is as much a part of our daily lives as air.
Even great cities, such as New York and Paris, are more memorable for their mix than for any great masterpieces.
And it isn't just the buildings: It's the sum total of all the human-made environment, from office towers to street signs. And on the light rail, you get something very like a World's Fair Futurama ride through the bricks and mortar of the city.
Get on anywhere. For $2.50, you can ride all day. The ride from end to end and back should take you about 2 1/2 hours. Early morning or late afternoon are the best times, when the sun isn't directly overhead blasting the world into a visual flatness.
Two things stand out: One is how ugly most of the human landscape is; the other is how much better the architecture is getting. There is a renaissance of design, from corporate towers to trendy condos.
So, what will you see? First of all, a lot of stucco.
If there is a city signature, it is writ in stucco. It's the bland goo that is the cake frosting of the Valley. It's the universal of building construction, as ubiquitous as logs were on the frontier or sandstone in Paris. It's cheap, it's easy and it's boring. Seeing so much stucco in one gulp will give you aesthetic indigestion. Bring a bromo.
As you ride along this arbitrary zipper line through the heart of Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa, you notice how poorly most of the buildings are designed. Whether they're cheesy remnants of a negligent past or the heedless constructions of the present, they are blotches along the road rather than garlands.
Of course, any city looked at with a cold eye will show you the same: dusty, trashy, empty lots surrounded by chain-link fences, next to old storefronts repainted and hand-lettered by amateurs, covered in magic-marker sale signs. Sidewalks with no plantings, powerlines strangling the sky.
The unconsidered corners of the urban experience, waiting for someone to notice and make use of them, or forgotten remnants of architecture past, left to wrack and ruin.
But there are two primary ways of failing. Neglect is one, but the other is more pernicious: bad design.
First there's overt bad design - that is, architects who have had a bad idea or plain bad taste - and second, there are those buildings with no design at all, created from templates or thrown together quickly by low-bid builders.
The second is more common: As you pass pharmacies, schools, condos, Starbucks, auto-repair shops, churches, you realize that the real enemy of good architecture is not so much badly designed buildings as un-designed buildings.
Some of those are merely banal: the McDonalds and shopping malls.
Our city is killing us with banality. I hear from readers who hate the new Henkel building in Scottsdale or have never liked ASU Gammage in Tempe, but I can't fathom why they build up such hatred, when all around are the soul-draining sameness of mini malls, gas stations and KFCs.
Landscapes along route
The Metro route traverses five distinct kinds of urban landscape. From the north, along 19th Avenue, you see 50-year-old tract housing, those cookie-cutter homes that recall the conformist 1950s of gray-flannel suits and Levittown American dreams gone to seed.
Farther south, along Central Avenue, the train passes the corporate heart of the Valley, with its two-hearted downtown, the upper rank of corporate towers from Indian School to Thomas roads and the older downtown clustered from Jefferson to Van Buren streets. The oldest notable building is the Luhrs Tower, from 1929 - built just before the stock-market crash - and the still-unfinished One Central Park East - begun before the current crash.
As the rails run east along Jefferson and Washington streets, from Phoenix to Tempe, the way is marked by cairns of gravel, for-lease signs, empty warehouses and vacant lots, interrupted occasionally by chain hotels and punctuated by Tovrea Castle and the Castle Megastore adult shop.
Fourth is Tempe, the college town, starting at the Mill Avenue Bridge and passing Sun Devil Stadium and a host of downtown shops and student housing.
Finally, from Tempe to Mesa, you find an endless run of mini malls and apartment complexes. It tends to be neat but unmemorable. It is the bland center of the Valley, with only sad reminders of the many old U.S. 60 motels, turned into residences with kitchenette signs out front.
View getting better?
Yet, along the whole length of the trip, there are indications that things are changing. There are new corporate buildings with an eye to design. They may not be great architecture, but they're at least thoughtful, with some attention paid to the exterior.
There is the First Solar building at Washington Street and Mill Avenue, Tempe's Hayden Ferry Lakeside, with its two football-shaped office towers, and One Central Park East in downtown Phoenix - all of them new office space that is more interesting.
And there arecondos and apartments springing up, like the Artisan Parkview on Washington and Seventh streets, the Lofts at Rio Salado on Washington and between Center Parkway and Priest Drive, and the Metro Manor on 19th Avenue and Colter Street - all of them intended to attract tenants or owners based on interesting design and a desire for urban living.
It isn't only the shiny new buildings. Even some of the older structures have been retro-fit, as it were, to make them more interesting.
The enemy is not bad taste, but blandness. A certain quotient of bad taste is necessary for a lively city.
So, while we applaud the renaissance in high-end architecture in the Valley, we have to notice that the light rail passes its share of brightly colored vernacular architecture, like the auto-repair shop at Washington and 15th streets, or the bright-red tattoo parlor at Camelback Road and 15th Avenue.
The desire for an interesting environment comes from the bottom up as well as the top down.
This rebirth of architectural interest can probably be dated to the construction in 1995 of the Burton Barr Central Library, designed by local architect Will Bruder. Since then, we've had our share of other new buildings by a handful of other local architects and a few imports from elsewhere. There isn't room to name them all: Eddie Jones and John Chonka, even those working for large architectural firms, who produce most of the big buildings. Then there was Antone Predock's plans for ASU's Nelson Fine Arts Center and the Arizona Science Center, or Richard Meier's fatally flawed but ambitious design for the Sandra Day O'Connor Federal Courthouse.
The battle is not won. We still have our portion of bad design, even among the new.
Just when you feel good about the pleasant stone and glass exterior of the new Phoenix Convention Center, you have to notice that the new downtown Sheraton is a Gumby-headed tombstone. Some buildings are designed by creative architects; others by engineers. The Sheraton looks like it was designed by accountants. Even its color scheme is bad: the dusty liver and tan were the same colors J.C. Penney sold in towels and tablecloths in the mid-1980s. It's not old enough to be retro yet, merely boring.
And not every new condo escapes the slather of generic stucco.
But cities are never done. They just keep changing. A city is a process, not a thing.
But the desire to live and work in a built environment that is interesting is a sign of civic and urban awareness.
And the view from the tram is looking up.
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Quote:
Buildings to watch for along the rail
There's a lot to see riding the light rail from end to end. Paying attention is the main thing. Look at everything you can and pick your most and least favorites.
Here are five buildings to watch for, one from each of the five legs of the light-rail route:
• 19th Avenue leg - Arizona Federal Credit Union, 5151 N. 19th Ave., Phoenix. A circular, upside-down pyramid, it's one of three upside-down pyramids in the Valley. Such buildings shade themselves.
• Central Corridor - Phoenix Financial Center, 3443 N. Central Ave. This is the noted "Punch-Card Building," which has two circular satellite buildings at its foot. It's one of the most distinctive buildings in the Valley.
• Washington Street leg - Auto repair shop, 1514 E. Washington St., Phoenix. This tiny shop has been painted with a blue front, a yellow frieze that reads "Full Auto Repair" and sunrise rays at the peak.
• Tempe leg - Convenience store, 1148 S. Terrace Road, Tempe. This relic of the past is one of the few remaining stores of the original 1950s design for the first Circle Ks in Arizona.
• Mesa leg - Watson's Flowers, 2425 E. Apache Blvd., Tempe. This simple Art Deco building, with its wonderful glass-block windows and curved facade, is a simple but elegant remainder from the Valley's architectural past.
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