Walt Lockley

The Cholla Branch

I've found three hangouts in Phoenix. These are the places I gravitate to when
I skip my day job. The first is a down-at-heels coffee shop called the New Yorker
which, like same of those old Ramblers and Furies you can see on the highway
sometimes, the original owners are driving without any sense of irony. The
booth upholstery is cracked, the waitresses are tough but sweet, it's a great
spot. The second is a narrow Starbucks on 19th Avenue and, uh, Northern, I
think.

And God help me, my third hang out is a branch public library. This little
building, the Cholla Branch, sits essentially in the parking lot of a regional
shopping center, Metrocenter, and was designed by the same architect, Wil
Bruder, who designed the hard-to-ignore new main library downtown. The
Central Library is the most exciting building I've walked through in a long
time. And I've essentially fallen in love with the little Cholla Branch.

Let me go ahead and get my prejudices out of the way. By law, a building has
to stand up, and it has to provide code-quality shelter. A building should also
do what it's meant to do, it should complete its mission. Most architects, once
they feel they have those essentials covered, tend to either make it as cheap as
possible, or concentrate on making the building look good. Good architects go
farther. Wil Bruder goes farther.

The Central Library downtown is easily as imposing, well thought out,
confident and comfortable as the Chicago city library. It looks great from the
street. The kids section features playful, biomorphic furnishings. (This is
where my friend Ariel and his girlfriend Rachel met, and I like to think of them
beginning their relationship in this place, which reminds me of Gary Panter's
design for Pee-Wee's Playhouse.). It has an attractive glass elevator which
goes up five stories inside, and its high-ceilinged fifth floor reading room and
its yellow light fixtures strike me as half-Radio City and half-Ridley Scott,
which is of course exactly right. It seems okay, in the Central Library, to linger
and explore. In a city where free public hangouts are especially rare, this is
especially welcome.

And there's more. I learned from Ariel that the building, like Babylonian
observatories, is situated for sunlight tricks on the day of the vernal equinox.
Like Arcosanti, it has a few copper bells on display - natural, since Bruder
studied under international crackpot architect Paolo Soleri out here in Arizona,
and Paolo's 80th birthday was celebrated by the city of Phoenix in this library.
(I'm being flippant and rude, I know. Excuse me. Soleri is an easy target)
And it incorporates both a tensegrity structure in the roof and motorized
louvers on the south face of the building, for climate control. Both of these
features remind me of Bucky Fuller, and that always makes me smile.

Somehow the equinox thing strikes me as grandstanding. And since I'm
hanging out at Starbucks too, I notice some common decor themes here. No
surprise. Bruder is very much into industrial materials used as decorative
elements, a very Gehry-Piano-Koolhaus vocabulary. In the Cholla, a set of
black coils, like the coils on telephone handsets but big and black, spill down
from the high second-floor ceiling just as in Starbucks the floor tile grid is
canted 30° to the walls, and freeform plywood shapes are bolted behind the
men's room mirror. Stylistically, it's all very similar, all very hip and elegant.
Very Fraser. From Starbucks this trendy minimalism has been transmitted, like
a virus, to infect the interiors of jazz clubs and upscale food boutiques and
downtown bars. I visited Toronto in February and saw a boatload of this sort
of stuff, particularly light fixtures.

Bruder uses these techniques and materials. With him it's more than a stylistic
decision, more than skin-deep, but unfortunately it's still not likely to age well.
Ten years from now it may automatically recall the Zeitgeist of the 90's,
barefoot celebrities and coffeehouses and the New Beetle and whatever else
this era may be remembered for. (It strikes me that I feel much more a citizen
of the Zeitgeist than of Phoenix.) This is not an ageless design. Ten years later
people look at photographs and shriek with laughter, like they do with their
hairstyles. Soon it will be in bad taste. Ultimately a joke. Then afterwards,
when people begin to take the joke seriously, this industrial style is destined to
become the retro of the future, and only time will tell if the Cholla will survive
the sensible remodellers of 2009 to reward the architecture critics of 2019.

This is really my only quibble with Wil Bruder.

Zeitgeist aside, Mr. Bruder clearly has a sense for some important and
neglected issues in architecture: the use of light, respect for human scale and
the haptic effect of a building, sensitivity to climate and site and environment
(this is Phoenix, after all), and most centrally, most importantly, his use of
ornament to make his spaces explain themselves and entertain the patrons.
Without doubt Bruder is thinking about the right things.

Onward to the Cholla. Compared to the Central Library's 300,000 square feet,
the Cholla Branch is a 20,000 square-foot two-story jewel box.

I have three favorite places.

One, the Well. Downstairs east, half-hidden behind stacks, there's a semi-
circular back room lined with bookcases with a circular lightwell and a circular
wooden table, a poem in itself, the nicest kind of cul de sac. I look at ceilings,
and generally the more complicated a ceiling is, the better I like it; the lower
level here has an exposed-HVAC, interesting, spare-but-complex ceiling.
Today the Well was occupied by a lurking patron (no job?) with bad hair and
fat thighs, which reminds me that I've come to think of the Well as mine. I see
there is a curved surveillance mirror mounted on the ceiling. I use it to watch
the intruder.

And well, her thighs aren't fat, but they are white.

Bruder's use of ornament and color is not understated at all, and that's another
virtue in my book. When you look up from your book, there's actually stuff to
look at. His spaces are elegant and loud at the same time, flamboyant, self-
advertising, sort of glorious. I know of some remarkable little green star-like
lights in the steel vaulted ceiling upstairs, they remind me of airplane hangars,
let's go look at those.

Two, the Monk's Room. Upstairs east, there's an unmarked, box-like room
behind a glass partition. Three blank walls compose this room, with the glass
partition facing the rest of the second floor; no ceiling, open to the same rafters,
but greatly sound-dampened. The eight desks in here are individually spot-lit
by a 4 x 4 pattern of hanging fixtures, which dangle above this room like lit
dots on a domino. (Check it out: the domino lights, I just realized, are the
same lights that dangle from the big black coils I mentioned earlier.) From
within the room they give nice overhead reading / writing light on each desk's
surface. From outside the room it sends a message - Quiet. Those entered
here are in the Klub of Kwiet. It are scholarly pursuits which bring them to this
special place. Ye too can enter this holy square of Domino Fixtures if ye
acceed to Klub rules and klose thy trap. Personally I hesitate to even sniff in
here.

And, oh yah, from this seat in the quiet room of the upstairs floor of the Cholla
Branch of the Phoenix Public Library perpetrated by Wil Bruder, the library
looks more mission-controlly. The parallel steel tubes on the ceiling on the
right look like the sci-fi window dressing in the original passenger loading
platform at Space Mountain. Or the room under Dr. No's swimming pool at
Pinewood Studios.

But see, this is an unmarked room. There's no 'Quiet!' sign. You just know.
The space explains itself perfectly. It's also, by the way, a curiously masculine
room.

Did you see the green lights?

Three, the Can. Cholla Branch toilets have a sense of humor. They're
dramatically lit black-and-white bathrooms with big curve-neck-of-science
faucets and good proportions. Best of all, though, there are only two accents of
color in the bathroom. The first is a mysterious but intuitively right yellow tile
line trailing from wall to floor, which (for me) suggests a police do-not-cross
line, which demarks the clean part of the room from the dirty. The second is a
splash of color from the bottom of the urinal. Each of the four urinals hosts a
perfect circle of urinal soap, each a different color (pink, royal blue, aqua, red)
and each one spotlit like a lounge singer. Bathrooms, being design-intensive
and always necessary and practically difficult and expensive to remodel,
always tell you the secrets of the building. They also tell you how the architect
thinks of his patrons. (Mr. Bruder has been written up for his attention to
detail, and I wonder if he designed this effect while regretting, over his drawing
board, that half his audience would never see it. I'm tempted to call him and
find out.)

Other features of the building also deserve as much attention. Downstairs west
there's an attractive and inviting children's section, too, the Nursery, except I
have trouble relaxing when my knees are stuck. On entry you're welcomed by
a contorted perforated sheet steel partition, the sort of thing you can't help but
touch. And the Cholla Branch also houses this sculpture called 'Language of
Light', a percent-for-art installation by Prescott Sculptor Joseph McShane. This
must be those brushed-steel astrolabe-looking objects here and there, and one
on the roof. If you're guessing what I'm guessing about the technical
capabilities and maintenance habits of sculptors from Prescott, you won't be
surprised that the librarians say the damn thing doesn't work.

It doesn't need to.

I like a building to know what it's doing, and the Cholla Branch knows. I like
a building to entertain me with green lights, to silently explain itself. It's those
spatial techniques that seem mysterious but are intuitively right that I love.
When an unknown place can speak, it's a beautiful, rewarding moment.