Arizona State University has a wonderful collection of vintage buildings on its Tempe campus, including Frank Lloyd Wright's last major design, a complementary building by Taliesin Associates, many designs by the great Wendell Rossman, and a lot of other mid-Century treasure by local guys like Ralph Haver, Kemper Goodwin, Ed Varney, Lescher & Mahoney and others.

These pages are meant to help encourage the decisionmakers at ASU to respect and maintain these historic properties, just as their significance is being understood. A good step in the right direction would be to stop knocking them down.

They don't have a proud track record lately. This site details that, of twelve historic ASU properties identified by architect Don Ryden in 2003, four of them have already been demolished. One of the four was the distinctive and historic "Golden Dome" Valley National Bank branch on Apache and University (below), and this list doesn't include any of the remaining eight modernist essays on Greek Row dating from 1961. The university is also currently (April 2008) in negotiations with the City of Scottsdale regarding the fate of the Kerr Cultural Center. People in Scottsdale feel strongly about this.

It wouldn't take much for the University to understand its long-term self-interest in preserving these buildings. It's a local sport, complaining about the valley's lack of history. Well, here it is.