It's hard to say whether the Three Fountains is beautiful. It's an important datapoint in Phoenician architectural history, that's for sure. It's a healthy vintage residential property and interesting as hell. The word 'uncompromising' comes to mind.

It has an intellectual lineage straight back to the Case Study Houses and (I would argue) back to the work of the German Modernists of the mid-1920s, particularly Mart Stam. Some of the designers who live here certainly love it, but you know that's equivalent to film students who fall in love with Ishtar or Marnie or The Testament of Dr. Mabuse for reasons the rest of us can't understand.

Three Fountains deserves your respect. Whether or not you love Three Fountains, I'll leave up to you.

From John Entenza's Arts & Architecture, March 1964, page 29:

"This 22-unit townhouse project is constructed on a 16-foot grid with each apartment consisting of about 1050 square feet and containing living room, kitchen, and half-bath downstairs; two bedrooms and bath upstairs. The structure is Glulam post (5-1/4 x 5-1/4) and beam (5-1/4 x 9-1/4) continuous on the 16-foot grid with concrete block exterior and party wall. Each unit has a private patio partitioned by 2'6" x 6'8" exterior masonite doors spaced 1" with steel 'T' sections top and bottom."

And each square, two-story unit has a front door opening onto a shared, common, linear garden, darkened by mesh squares stretched by the framework of the 16 x 16 grid above your head.

It's quite square. No curves, not a single one. Not only that, the architect was serious about that 16-foot grid. There's no interruption to that grid. The surrounding ground is even gridded out for the landscaping. That very compulsive strictness is what makes the Three Fountains feel right and make sense.

The architect?

Our man Al Beadle, Alfred Newman Beadle, who has a following in Phoenix and a video biography produced by the Gnosis, Ltd. He's the closest thing to an architectural hero Phoenix has produced.

He came to Phoenix in the 1950s after getting high-risk construction training (that's an understatement) as a Seabee in World War II. His career in the Phoenix area was marked by enormous effort and frustration, partly because he wasn't a licensed architect and continually tangled with the local AIA. This put him in a class with at least a couple of other local misbehaving architects without the "proper" credentials, one was Blaine Drake, another was Frank Lloyd Wright.

Out here in the empty desert the climate and the economic boom allowed Beadle to create some of the most forward-looking modern work in the United States. He really had vision. Among his projects:

- the only Case Study House built outside of California, #28, also known as "Case Study Apartments #1", now known as the Triad and sort of a sister project to the Three Fountains

- his own amazing 1958 White Gates residence (not to be confused with the somewhat similar Beadle Residence at 3520 East Oregon, originally designed by Killingsworth, Brady and Smith, who had also produced one of the Case Study Houses)

- the 1964 Executive Towers, the tallest building in Arizona when built

- another low-slung sister project, the 1965 Boardwalk Condominiums at 4225 N. 36th Street (see below)

- the 1972 steel-and-glass Mountain Bell building on Third Avenue

- the Paradise Gardens subdivision, eventually disowned by Beadle

- the fondly-remembered Safari Resort in Scottsdale, also eventually disowned by Beadle after it had been modified to hell

And many other commercial projects in the city, of varying degrees of interest.

 

Three photos of the Boardwalk Condominums here, similar to the Three Fountains in modular layout and its relationship to a common garden area, but with interesting variations. One of them is the extension of the module as a framework out to the front yard, gratiuitous and kind of brave and wonderful. This framework was originally wooden and has been rebuilt in steel.

 

 

 

Beadle obviously had John Entenza and Case Study connections, and he deserved all the attention he got.

But his rightful place in the history of Phoenix architecture is another thing. I don't think he's a desert architect. This puts me at odds with some dear friends and some smart people.

Beadle was a Miesian, which (generally) means like Mies van der Rohe he was pursuing architectural simplicity and discipline, a clarity of exterior shape, a disregard for all the old historical styles and conventional wisdom and ornament and color and curves, getting rid of all the unnecessary interior partitions, and reliance on the true strength and character of the materials. The Case Study Houses in postwar California, building all those lovely witty steel-frame experimental family homes, was another flavor of the Miesian approach of boiling the structure down to its essentials. For houses, it never quite caught on, but for most other structures this became the primary mode of building in the United States for decades, something that Tom Wolfe is still complaining about. Mies was held up as a God of Architects. Still is.

And the Three Fountains is an unusually strict example of the same thinking. You can see the simplicity and the discipline and the clarity.

 

But there are a couple of problems with Mies relevant to Three Fountains.

One, Mies was expensive. He liked expensive materials, he specified custom fittings, he didn't consider his clients' budgets as a constraint. Not unusual, but still a problem.

Two, all this reflects a certain preoccupation with shape, exterior shape. Mies removed all the interior paritions, removed that whole language of room sequence in favor of 'universal space', and didn't much care what happened inside the building. Judging buildings by their shapes is something like judging potential mates by their shapes, and although I hear this happens in Scottsdale all the time, it doesn't make it wise.

Three, based on his own statements, Mies didn't give a crap in a paper sack about his clients' needs or wants. There was a degree of attention to people's physiological requirements, like not allowing them to freeze to death, immediately anyway, but his clients' expectations were NOT in the equation. Mies's personal attitude about that, as far as anybody could divine from his rare ursine grumblings, was you'll get used to it, take it, or leave it. Mies, you know, never lived in any of his own designs.

Four, this idea of universal space didn't allow for any respect for context, any recognition that this building was in a particular place. They could be anywhere. These buildings are the same all around the world, hence, "International Style." Mies's best work in his late career, the Neue Nationalgalerie, began life as a Seagram's plant in the southern hemisphere. It would look equally regal and aloof in the jungle, in downtown Berlin, in the Sonoran desert, on the prairie, in a shallow luminous blue Carribbean sea, on the lunar surface, it doesn't matter.

So, taking all this back to Three Fountains:

Needlessly expensive? No, on the contrary. Beadle departs from Mies here significantly. The Three Fountains and the Boardwalk and (especially) the Triad were economical almost to a fault, and proof that great disciplined design can be inexpensive.

Overly concerned with exterior shape? Yeah, maybe.

(The other day I overheard somebody, a person I respect, say "it was shame that the trees had grown up so much, they spoiled the modern lines of the building, made it less photogenic." Oh, hell, no. As you walk through the Three Fountains the shade and the plants are absolutely necessary to the experience, that's where the dramatic tension comes from, the messiness of the foliage versus the beautifully toy-like rectilinear structure. Controlled vs. uncontrolled, order vs. chaos, artificial vs. natural. The trees make it much better.)

Are people comfortable here? Did Beadle go too far in getting rid of curves and spatial rhythm, does it feel too much like a warehouse for humans? Too many traditional illusions punctured? Well, the answer is that people seem perfectly happy and comfortable here in Beadle's 3-D grid, and my feeling is the Beadle was client-friendly, more in line with the human-friendly Case Study Houses than with Mies Himself. But this is interesting, what degree of simplification people will accept and find appealing. I suspect something about the shared garden helps.

Lastly, is the Three Fountains a desert building? Does it respond to the desert context?

This last question gets right to the heart of Beadle's reputation, and, sorry, no, I don't think it's a desert building at all. It would be more suitable for San Diego. It's a product of those postwar years when fluorescent lights made direct sunlight obselete (we thought) and air conditioning made shading and insulation obselete (we thought) . It was built where the climate is permissive in certain ways, the lack of snow and the relative lack of rain, and absolutely punishing in other ways, like the heat and the relentless sunshine slowly destroying wood and plastic.

As to responding to the landscape, Beadle's (endangered) White Gates residence looks like it was literally dropped in by helicopter:

It would look equally regal and aloof in the jungle, in downtown Berlin, in the Sonoran desert, on the prairie, in a shallow luminous blue Carribbean sea, on the lunar surface, it wouldn't matter.

I'd argue that the strength of some of these lauded modernist designs in Phoenix never responded to the surrounding desert as much as they responded to the emptiness of the surrounding desert as a framing device, a framing device that would make all kinds of houses look equally good, or at least brave, against all those wide open spaces. And those wide open spaces are no longer there.

So, Al Beadle: great and worthy architect, but just because a modernist building has been deposited on the desert, doesn't make it Desert Modernism.