Walt Lockley

Hangin with Judy Jetson

The Burton Barr Central Library, Phoenix, Arizona

Pros: powerful but comfortable public space, elegant, fun

Cons: no frisbee golf allowed on 5th floor; no place to freshen
my Chivas & Coke; my large fine

Geek city, I realize, to review a public library like it's a tourist
attraction.

But you'd like it.

I fell in love with it one afternoon while idling among a sea of
desks on the fifth floor reading room. The fifth floor is one huge,
airy, futuristic room. For every desk, there's a cool lemon-colored
light fixture all your own. The fifth-floor ceiling is absurdly high,
high enough to make you half-believe you're outside. Or that the
whole place is going to start humming with the low thunder of an
incoming starcraft. The visual style of the place is half Radio City
and half Ridley / Gilliam / Burton, and it's the perfect place to
read and write, it's stimulating but not distracting. You feel
productive, at least I do, even when I'm blowing off an
afternoon, researching at whim.

(If going off-topic bothers you please simply skip these italics.
Here we go. Researching at whim is an expensive vice, a luxury,
I know, please forgive me for being a wastrel. But I'd picked up a
NYTimes that morning with an interview with Jack Valenti, the
head of the Motion Picture Association, the censor board, you
know. You know Jack Valenti. In the interview he claimed to
have been a former B-25 bomber pilot with Distinguished Flying
Cross, a black belt in tae kwon do (huh?), and that LBJ had hired
him as a special assistant on the spot in Dallas, the afternoon
JFK was shot, and I thought, huh? Wha? That doesn't sound
much like LBJ. So I checked out Valenti's story in his previous
biography of LBJ, and sure enough he was lying to the Times,
puffing up his own reputation, an old man and his war stories.
He'd been working for Lyndon way before that day. Despite all
that, I'm still on Valenti's side, if only for the following quote
from that interview, on the movie business and the First
Amendment: "It's the price you pay for freedom. The price you
pay for this is slime. You have to allow tawdry, meretricious,
soiling, loathsome, even unwholesome stuff into the
marketplace." Yeah, soiling! Valenti's okay! Soiling! Ha!)

Anyway back to the fifth floor. So I was hanging out up there,
absently looking forward to my next trip to the space-age men's
room, cause I love the space-age men's room too, when I hear
this rhythmic 'ping' in the background. Like the sonar ping in a
submarine. It was the elevator noise, one of those services
noises meant to be tuned out. The ping is subtle but it does a lot
to mold the experience of that top floor - it audibly reminds you
how big the space is, and it's all science-fictiony. == ping ==
PERfect. It's a great architectural trick.

The Burton Barr Central Library - the Judy Jetson Central Library
would be better - is functionally as imposing, well thought out,
confident, comfortable and worthy of attention as the Harold
Washington Library in Chicago. Second-best building in Phoenix.
From the street it looks like bad-guy headquarters in a Japanese
spy film. A model, too cool for full scale. If you test reality by
going through the doors, you get 300,000 square feet of open
stacks to wander around in, including a childrens' section with
trippy, playful biomorphic furniture.

It's okay to linger and explore. Here in Phoenix sized only for the
automobile, here in the land of the generous turning ratio, here a
city with a total lack of public hangouts, very few walkable
neighborhoods, here with no 'here' for community feeling to take
root, it's refreshing to be in a public place where you're not

a) melting from heat,
b) being visually x-rayed for annual income information or
c) in a mall

The trade-off is that, on any given day, one-third of the patrons
are homeless. They gather for an obvious reason. It's nice and
cool in the library, and nobody hassles them out. Unless they do
something extreme. If Rudolph Guliani ran Phoenix, the Judy
Jetson Library would be a far lonelier place -- but we don't have
Rudolph Guliani, we have a guy named Skip Rimsza. Yeah! Skip!
Like Skip town! Like Skip a payment! Can you believe this! And
our governor!

So I sorta think of the Judy Jetson Library as the best meaningful
social program in the city. The most famous homeless guy here is
known as Chuckles, a dark-skinned homeless gentleman who tells
himself jokes all day and laughs at the jokes. Bruder has done
Chuckles a great service. I wouldn't be much surprised if Bruder
has a feeling for library architecture as a social statements,
because he already demonstrates an eye for detail (like the
elevator noise), a sense of humor, and a firm grasp of the Grand
Gesture. No question. Bruder is a brilliant architect.

And unusually hip. You could wear wraparound sunglasses and a
Devo energy hat here and you wouldn't feel out of place. Look
around with the eye of a contractor and you see that these
aesthetic effects are put together by off-the-shelf components
like perforated steel sheets, black electrical coils, simple things
that nobody else would see for their industrial/sculptural beauty
-- yeah --

Ariel also tells me this building is physically oriented for sunlight
tricks on the day of the vernal equinox. Like Arcosanti, it has a
few copper bells on display - natural, since Will Bruder studied
under architect Paolo Soleri out here in Arizona. And the Judy
Jetson incorporates both a Buckminster Fuller tensegrity structure
in the roof and motorized louvers on the south face of the
building, for improved climate control in the hot hot sun. Anybody
who can tell me what a tensegrity even is, is okay in my book;
anybody who incorporates a tensegrity into a major building
project is automatically invited over for dinner.

Ten years from now the Judy Jetson may automatically recall the
Zeitgeist of the 90's, barefoot celebrities on magazine covers,
and Iced Latte Ventis, and the New Beetle, and whatever else
this era may be remembered for. That's the only possible
drawback I see. But we're not there yet, and right now, if
buildings and spaces speak to you at all, you should come check
this place out.

I've been asked to make a correction. The Burton Barr Central Library is not attributable to a single person or firm; it didn't burst from Bruder's forehead as a fully grown and armed adult, like Athena from Zeus. No. I'm not the only one who is guilty of this sloppy habit of thinking and writing, but I know beter.

Will Bruder was the design architect in association with Wendell Burnette and the Phoenix firm of DWL Architects, perhaps better known under its previous name of Weaver and Drover. Some of the same architects who worked on the Hayden Library and Sun Devil Stadium and the Valley National Banks worked on this building, and to neglect their contribution here was an error.