Alright, let's turn our attention to the Administration A Building, we're walked right past it several times. Straightforward practical design. The photo above is Administration B, which is connected to, and looks the same as, Administration A., except B is three stories and A is two.

Both of them have that single discreet band of ornament, recessed windows, and deeply recessed exterior stair wells with almost-stylish railings. It works. Isn't that what buildings are for?

A dates from 1950. B dates from a year after. Same look, same colors, same brick, same architect, same Ed Varney. Varney's office also responsible for Valley Ho, the former Washburn Piano Store recently bulldozed, the 'conning tower' at the old-Motorola-now-General-Dynamics long factory facade down on that street I can never think of, the Los Arcos street, that's McDowell.

And lots of other Phoenix landmarks. Ed Varney should have a fan club by now.

For a no-frills building, Administration A has one large frill in your face. It's a dramatic and colorful mural called Hopi Snake Dance / Preparing Anti-Venom Serum. The muralist is the noted Jean Charlot, French-born and Mexican-trained and one-time asisstant to Diego Rivera, and this linked site has all kinds of photos of his work. The legend on the mural itself says, "Man’s Wisdom Subdues the Aggressive Forces of Nature." Under the steps it says, "Painted in true fresco by Jean Charlot and students - Summer 1951."

Mural is weird as hell -- that's top praise -- and hard to photograph in person. Always hard to photograph stairs anyway.

Varney's Administation Buildings were published in the Architectural Record in August 1952, along with Blaine Drake work, as examples of buildings well-designed to keep out the sun and spread that new sweet lovin' air-conditioning all around.

This is Best Hall, a residential building for the Barrett Honors College, named for M.O. Best and built in 1956. Simple but stylish and elegant in its way. The more you look at it the more you understand that the designers were doing more with less. Without any curves, working only with brick and concrete and glass planes, it's a humane little statement with a nice rhythm and still in good shape 50 years later.

This is the work of Weaver and Drover.

I'm very sorry that I dissed the Music Building before, the 'birthday cake' building. Sometimes confused with the Gammage, same desert-rose color, same mysterious style or lack of identifiable historical style.

I apologize to the Music Building right now, it's better and more interesting than I'd assumed.

The Music Building comes out of Taliesin Associates in 1970, eleven years after FLW's death, during Olgivanna's long reign. It's credited variously to Taleisin Associates, the FLW Foundation, and/or solely to William Wesley Peters, MIT-dropout, FLW's completely loyal, long-suffering apprentice, lieutenant, and known to history as the son-in-law of both Frank Lloyd Wright and Joseph Stalin, although not, thank God for him, at the same time.

And there are those half-circle windows. You can see those on the Gammage across the way, and also on the 1950 David Wright building elsewhere (private owners, no trespassing, undisclosed location) in the Valley, which Frank Lloyd Wright reportedly used to work out the circular kinks in his Guggenheim plans.

Part of the pleasure of the Music Building is the way it meets the ground. The strong circular form, visible from a long way away, drops down to within -- what? -- nine feet of the ground at the base, providing an instantly legible entry and shade all around. That's a very good three-dimensional moment, discovering those radial shapes underneath, which changes your sculptural perception (if such a thing) of the shapes above you. This is an eight-story building. There are three basement levels plugged into the earth, with a theatre stashed down there and an Organ Hall somewhere with a big organ.

The fifth floor, as you can see on this floorplan, has a patio open to the sky, now sensibly covered by an awning, which is a forecourt for the Recital Hall, which as the setting for all student musicians' dreaded performance 'finals' and the physical locus of the entire building, kind of centers and concentrates all that furious aspirational musical energy, it you want to get all feng shui about it. The floorplan also shows you the circular hallways and odd-shaped offices, raising the question, was this really necessary since curves are awfully expensive and all custom. Don't know the answer to that.

After a proper introduction, a walkthrough on a Monday with classes in session and furious clashing piano music wafting around its circular hallways, music from furious clashing young people, the Music Building has a certain mystique and isn't so bad, in fact it's another major chunk of this wonderful retro quality that ASU has and I hope it recognizes and appreciates and preserves.