After the War of the Lumberjacks

The nautical Scottsdale Springs condominiums, in the photos above and below, seems awfully familiar to me, because it's lodged in my consciousness. Such as it is. I spent my high school years in the 1970s among much the same dated and misplaced nautical trappings. It was out of place in the hickory and oak forests of suburban St. Louis, and it's dramatically out of place here in the desert.

Incredibly, there's a lot of this stuff in Phoenix.

American had a rash in the 1970s, a rash of cedar-shingle ski lodges and mining shacks and nautical quotations in vernacular. It must have either struck something in the ambient Zeitgeist or else it was cheap. All over the midwest and in Los Angeles and down here in the desert -- you'd think the whole country had a war with lumberjacks. Having looked at this 70s style for awhile, I see three half-serious and overlapping subgenres, all in wood.

- The Nautico -- basically whatever has piers and thick ropes out front, like this Scottsdale Springs and the "Spinnaker" example at the bottom of this page

- Trapped in Aspen -- roofs angled for heavy snow loads, batten boards, shapes made to nestle in the trees, vague connotations of "woodsy" lifestyle choices and ski chalets. Comes with pine trees and collections of pine needles in the gutters

- Cannery Style -- stylistic quotes from the supposedly-honest, supposedly-practical, rambling, improvised-looking barns and mine sheds in the Pacific Northwest with monopitch roofs facing different directions and big exposed pipes

Northwest Regional

These two shots are of an extremely oak building, clearly from about 1973, in downtown Scottsdale, since been boarded up to keep the street drunks out. The building is doomed, of course. Today's fast-moving Blackberry-using slinky sexy developer is likely to stand nearby and toss lit matches towards it one after another. But do you remember this kind of thing? Have you seen this before? Does it seem like a stale joke, or what?

All wooden, impossible to imagine in concrete or stone or steel frame. The effect is inseparable from the materials, the shape is inseparable from the effect, the material is inseparable from the shape. It references back to Northwest Regionalism, stems from a cannery vernacular, and the exterior massing tends to lean heavily towards soaring triangles and exposed structure and dramatic diagonal bracing.

Okay, I looked it up, and "Northwest Regional" goes all the way back to the late 30's, partly pioneered by Pietro Belluschi and patterned after Oregon's barns and canneries, a style with "Broad overhanging gable or hipped roofs covered with shingles, often with broken or asymmetrical slopes; non-academic forms and details (you can say that again); asymmetrical floor plans; large glass windows of various shapes; wood-frame construction with unfinished & unpainted siding of native woods; extensive use of load-bearing macramé and rainbow toesocks as structural components (no I made that up); and integration of structure and environment." Yeah. That sounds right.

Aspen Drama on a Shoestring

A wonderful terrible example of a woodsy 70s office building in downtown Phoenix, in an area remarkable for its rare, deep shade and grand old mission-style houses and palm trees. This is the corner of 7th Street and Palm Lane, just a short walk east of the Phoenix Art Museum.

These photos convey a couple of things well enough: the orientation of the slats on each of the three shapes that emphasize a crazy-house feeling, the severe weathering of the wood exterior, and the trickiness of the scale, which is kind of nice. Too bad the placement of that sliding-glass door gives the game away.

It kind of looks like a mountain range.

But these photographs don't convey the unnecessarily-complicated quality of the features. There's a little pathway covered with ascending slats, and the shapes are simply random as far as I can tell, the roofs seem to expect a heavy dumping wet snow any second, and there's a -- well, hard to describe. No photographs could convey the overall effect on this corner of an alien and dated presence on the street. The trees are foreign too, as if the guy said, wait, the pine needles must accumulate in the gutters to pull off this look, they've gotta be crispy, brown little needles, get the book, find me the right tree, I don't care how much you gotta water it, don't care, don't care, I can't hear you he says, sticks his fingers in his ears, la-la-la-la-la.

This little building is charming, but it's not from around here, or it's not telling the truth, or both. And a fire place! Oh my gosh, every little law office in Phoenix needs a fire place for those long August afternoons.

No Comment

This science-fiction office building speaks for itself, except to note that that windowless blue standing-seam-roof facade with the gratuitous tower (it's not a light scoop.... I wonder how it looks from inside...) actually faces northwest, where the sun would never try to come in anyway; the garden area with the low arch faces the hottest and sunniest southwest angle. Curious.

This little office building on Thomas is easy to overlook. It's modest, tucked behind its own vintage biome. The roofline on all four sides slants away from visual inspection, retreating from the eye. There are the diagonal batten boards, and that ribbed metal plate roofing, and big dark windows recessed into the diagonals. Nice. The least-ridiculous building on this page by far.

The full text of Ernest Callenbach's "Ecotopia" can be found here.

Pedestrian Malls

All this relates to the pro-pedestrian social-design humane-design movement in the 70's, and relates to pedestrian malls. This example is in Phoenix, the Town and Country Mall.

The more I find out about Halprin and Moore, the more I realize that there was a healthy, broadbased pro-ped movement, if you want to call it that, in the late 60's and early 70's just as you'd expect from the environmental Zeitgeist etc. That was the birth of the environmental design movement, where these guys... and other less talented guys... tried to transform urban and suburban environments into walking environments wherever they could. And it didn't stick. (Come to think of it, it might have been killed on purpose by the auto industry, like the streetcars.)

Mandated Togetherness

Lately the New York Times and its smarty-pants ilk has begun using the phrase "social condenser" to refer to a certain kind of architectural setup that encourages human interaction.

They reach back all the way to the 1930s Russian ASNOVA and Vkhutemas schools, and the Narkomfin Building, for that term. They're full of crap for at least four reasons. One, there was really never such a thing operative in Soviet society, and two, you don't have to go back that far, you only have to go as far as the 1970s in America, especially the pedestrian malls and apartment buildings like this one. And three, their use of the term is like a child learning the phrase "Pinot Grigio" and calling every single dark liquid "Pinot Grigio!" just because it's fun to say, it makes him sounds smart, he thinks. And four has the social condenser ever worked anyway? Uh, probably not.

These are photos of the former Foxtree Apartments on Scottsdale Road, just north of the Tempe line. The buildings are unremarkable-invisible. But the spaces between are way more interesting: sculpted with irregular berms, to my eye carefully measured out for human interaction and sightlines (note overlooking balconies), littered with props like barbecue pits and benches and sittable walls and curvy paths..... you know what? Foxtree was a social condenser.

One Foot on the Yo Ho Ho...

While hunting for an entirely different era in mid-Phoenix, floored to find this well-preserved and brilliantly dumb example, a pleasure shot through with secret relief. See, I don't want you to think I'm making this up.

The value here isn't architectural excellence -- ha! -- and it's not simply making fun. C'mon, it's just commercial vernacular, an easy target for empty ridicule. I just wanted to point out there's a lot of typical 70s design tics crammed into one small space here. Like a thesis.

1) Big wooden panels used as an ornamental element, puzzling, maybe something to do with scale, maybe trying to persuade you that this is a carefully crafted wooden building. Unsightly weathering typical.

2) A vaguely compass-y round skylight.

3) A gratuitous triangle meant, I suppose, to echo the dramatic angles of the Northwest Regional source of weather-beaten, sea-oriented, romantic structures like Sea Ranch.

4) My guess is that these planters were thickly planted, once upon a time, so green stuff would cascade and spill over those walls hanging-gardens-style and provide a softer low edge to the building.

5) You'd just have to stand in the hot flat desert street in Phoenix to feel how incredibly bizarre and inappropriate this sign is. Forget "how far are we from the ocean," it barely rains here, and there are days when you feel one drop of water on your tongue would give you 20 more sweet minutes on Earth before you keel over. And this guy is talking about a spinnaker. That wooden, carved, painted sign with rounded corners, fancy-dopey font, and nailed to those piers that way, is 70s wood exactly.

6) Roofline just totally screwed up with this rounded hood thing. Maybe it makes better sense from the inside.

7) And those dock ropes strung from pier to pier are the icing on the cake. Yo ho ho! Put it all together, it's the architectural equivalent of a kid's blue and white sailor suit.