Tucson Weekly: Landmark Decisions (March 25

By Margaret Regan
R. BROOKS JEFFERY knows what buildings Tucsonans like, and he has the votes to prove it. Almost two years ago, Jeffery, assistant curator of the Arizona Architectural Archives at the UA, helped organize a Tucson architecture contest through The Arizona Daily Star, and readers voted overwhelmingly for 10 buildings. Their selections do not surprise.
They mostly picked edifices that evoke the region's culture or history or geography, to wit: San Xavier Mission, Old Main at the UA, the Pima County Courthouse, St. Philip's in the Hills Church, the Arizona State Museum at the UA, Ventana Canyon Resort, the Arizona Inn, the Steinfeld mansion, the Convent Avenue streetscape and the Tucson Museum of Art.
Review The top three old reliables--the Mission, Old Main and the courthouse--almost invariably win readers' endorsements in the Tucson Weekly's Best of Tucson poll as well. So Jeffery got to thinking: How could he get building buffs in the Old Pueblo to look beyond the tried and true?
The answer is simple. Establish a list of Tucson Architectural Landmarks. With honor and fanfare, put the lovable 10 on the established landmark list. Insist that people consider other buildings in subsequent votes. Which is exactly what's happening here. In the second edition of the Tucson Architectural Landmarks contest, voters must choose from a new list of 10 buildings, selected by a panel of architectural experts.
"This is meant to get people out and take a look at buildings," Jeffery explained one recent morning in his cluttered office in the UA Architecture Building. "Don't be an armchair citizen."
To counteract the tendency of sentimentalists to vote only for buildings from the distant past, the panel established two different pools, a historic category and a post-World War II contemporary category. (The contemporary structures are all at least 10 years old.) Readers can vote for one building in each category. At the same time, local members of the American Institute of Architects will be casting votes. The two winners will be added to the Landmarks list.
Ballots (available below) are due at The Weekly offices by Friday, April 9. The winners will be announced during AIA Architecture Week, in the April 22 edition of the Tucson Weekly.
"There's a subversive goal to all this," Jeffery genially admitted. "The general public are the consumers of architecture...The idea is to raise their awareness of what's good architecture. If people are demanding more of their architecture, if we educate the consumers to have higher standards, developers are going to respond."
One can only hope.
THE FIVE OLDEST buildings on the committee's list take a viewer on a meandering journey through Tucson history. They include houses and apartments, and commercial and public buildings. The oldest, La Casa Cordoba (No. 1 on the ballot), now part of the Tucson Museum of Art Historic Block, sets the pattern for much of what's still prized here in the desert. A classic Sonoran adobe row house, its thick walls wrap around a central open courtyard. It's the template for all those indoor-outdoor rooms in contemporary houses and central patios in today's office parks and apartments.
La Casa is not as glamorous as the museum's other adobes, the Stevens and Fish houses on Main Street, but it's typical of low-cost, hand-made vernacular architecture of its period. It once was at the northern end the city's oldest barrio, much of which was leveled in the short-sighted days of urban renewal. Its two oldest rooms date to 1848, built when Southern Arizona was still a part of Mexico. More rooms were added in 1879.
A few blocks to the north, the elegant El Presidio Bed & Breakfast (2) started life in 1870 in much the same way as La Casa Cordoba: with thick adobe walls and a flat roof. But in 1880 the railroad chugged into town, forever changing Tucson's isolation and reliance on local materials. Victoriana was all the rage, and the trains brought in the wood and glass needed to change the stolid adobe into the Old Pueblo's version of a Victorian Painted Lady. Paul Weiner restored the place in 1980 to its high Victorian glory.
By 1915, when the Scottish Rite Cathedral (3) was built, Anglo Tucsonans weren't in the least interested in indigenous styles. They wanted to build impressive public buildings and they looked to Europe for architectural inspiration. Architect Henry C. Trost drew on Roman and Greek Revival for the symmetrical--and tall--facade of this Masonic temple. Inside, the lobby is lined with Arts and Crafts wood beams. But the real surprise comes in the central meeting hall. An elaborate wonderland of blue and white pilasters, it's lifted from the style of the High Renaissance. Contemporary architect Bob Vint restored the brick and terra cotta exterior in 1995.
But also in 1915, the California-Panama Exposition in San Diego promoted a new regional style, the Spanish Colonial Revival, which reformulated the older Spanish elements of red tile roofs, porticos and white stucco. A.G. (Annie) Rockfellow, chief architect in the Jaastad firm, became its champion in the Old Pueblo. By 1918, her Plaza School (4) (now Safford School) went up south of Armory Park, one of the earliest local examples of a style that would entrance Tucsonans for years.
Broadway Village (5), built in 1939, shows Spanish Colonial Revival still going strong several decades later. Architect Josias Joesler created his version of a Spanish/Mexican village in this commercial complex, full of courtyards and archways. Joesler thoughtfully banished cars to a back lot shaded by trees. The result is a place that prizes the pedestrian experience and presents to the street an elegant face of red brick and tile.
Modernism eventually made regionalism--and Spanish Colonial Revival--seem a little kitschy to architects, and to the town fathers who envisioned a downtown of sleek, space-age skyscrapers. But the best modernists at least took local geography into account. Arthur T. Brown, whom Jeffery calls "Tucson's pioneer of solar design," softened the big red-brick blocks of his 1965 Tucson General Hospital (6) with a golden space frame meant to shade the windows of the south wall from the fierce desert sun.
Likewise, for his First National Bank of Arizona (7) downtown, William Engelhardt of Cain Nelson Wares gave some thought to shielding pedestrians from solar rays. A colonnade of arches fans out from the southern and western walls of his brick-clad steel building, constructed in 1968. Dwarfed nowadays by the anonymous government building west across Stone Avenue, the little building is on a human scale, only about three stories high.
Bob Swaim's Orchard River Townhomes (8) were on the edge of town (east of Fort Lowell Park) when they were built in 1971-'72. Architect Swaim commendably acknowledged the place's rural origins by preserving its original pecan trees. Today the trees are filled with birds, who chirp merrily along the pedestrian corridors separating the one- and two-story houses of concrete block, concrete floors, clerestory windows and private patios. The cars are quarantined in carport lots.
The Manlove Studios (9) in Barrio San Antonio is a classic infill project, designed and built in 1988 by Arthur Perkins and Philip Rosenberg. Just east of downtown, the gray-block modernist structures blend surprisingly well both with the neighborhood's older houses and its industrial plants. Intended as live/work spaces for artists, the two-story units have big north-facing windows. Its two buildings are L-shaped--just like the Casa Cordoba--and wrap around a central courtyard landscaped with native plants.
Canyon View Elementary School (10) was built to serve all those ugly houses crowding up against Sabino Canyon. But architect James A. Gresham, of NBBH-Tucson, tried to go lightly on the land, arranging the classrooms in small groupings connected by covered walkways. The kids go easily from inside to outside, walking on a bridge across a preserved arroyo and treading between desert plants. They may not know it, but they're enjoying the best aspects of Sonoran colonial design.

Margaret Regan wishes to acknowledge consulting R. Brooks Jeffery's research on these buildings.

Home | Currents | City Week | Music | Review | Books | Cinema | Back Page | Archives