This curved tower and its two little round, uh, companions, are located on Central.

If you live in Phoenix, you might know this building, and you know that the urban experience here can be horizontal to an unsettling degree. It gets to you mentally after awhile. So occasionally it's not unpleasant to drive in an open car down Central, from north to south towards downtown, lined with tall old palm trees and a collection of mid-sized office towers large enough to produce an illusion of civic density.

This curved tower is towards the north end of this Central cluster and it makes a friendly landmark. It occupies a block to itself, a little campus, consisting of this curved tower, two matching round pavilions witih black windows standing alongside Central, and a round manicured green lawn. Everything in surprisingly good time-warp shape. The circular lawn is humanized, subtly, by a colored pattern in the walkway, a double ribbon of DNA I guess, that winds all the way around.

The back of the tower, facing south towards the sun, more accurately The Fiery Angry Sun, is all slit windows like a punch card with a secret message. So some people got the idea that it was the IBM building. The tower is aligned to curve inward towards its best shade, and creates shade on that manicured circular lawn.

You can't tell from the photographs, but on the inside, as you're walking towards the central entrance, the height and rhythm of those gold vertical piers and the enclosing effect of that semicircular facade optically, haptically, almost physically pull you along. The height and materials suggest a 1976 Vegas casino high-rise, the trim still sharp enough to cut your fingers.

The tower is interrupted with an additional balcony. That's because the first eleven stories were finished in 1968, and the other eight added four years later.

Late in 1970, Western Savings opened "The Westerner Club" high in the tower, available without cost to any customer with $7500 on deposit. "Services of the club include: travel tours at reduced rates, free notary public service, one free long distance phone call per month and free safe deposit boxes when available." What a bounty!

The client was local financier David Murdoch and (according to research done by artist Jason Hill) ground for the building was broken in September 1963 by the Financial Corporation of Arizona, as a one-stop financial shopping center for businesses and individuals. It contains a "fallout-proof" time capsule due to be opened in 2012. And "the original vision of the architect called for a second tower mirroring the first." That's a common story around here. Executive Towers was supposed to be the first of two; the Mountain Bell Building was also supposed to be the first of two.

There are also two sets of drive-through bank machines, photos below, which are mid-Century to an extreme. The north set sit under a pair of concrete fins. Decide for yourself whether you like them. The south set sit under a number of umbrellas with, sort-of, horizontal fluid patterns through the alleys. They're weird and lovable.

The architect's name is Sarmiento, a lovely lilting name in its many variations: Wenceslaus Alfonso Sarmiento, in one source Wenceslaus Alfonsa Sarmiento (I don't believe that one), also known as Wenceslao, sometimes also known as W. A. Sarmiento. The architect Sarmiento deserves a little more attention than he gets, as somebody who influenced the look and feel and pattern of everyday American life, but if he ever gets really famous, his name is ready for it.

Sarmiento came to America to visit his sister and had a car wreck in St. Louis. Bang! The man in the other car happened to be John B. Gardner, who gave Sarmiento a job (bang!) at the Bank Building Corporation of America (the BBC) as head designer from 1951 through 1961, after which Sarmiento founded his own sixty-person office and worked for another twenty years. He built hundreds of banks across the country. This country. Sarmiento was a driving force behind modernizing the look and feel of banking in postwar America, and you can find out more about that here and here.

This Phoenix Financial Center was his biggest project.

"Sarmiento designed a half a dozen banks in the Los Angeles area that still have an impact on the streetscape and skyline. Van Nuys Federal Savings, on Van Nuys Boulevard in Panorama city, is clearly in the spirit of Niemeyer: a concrete dome strengthened by two criss-crossing ribs rising out of brick buttresses. The dome is stretched on one side to create a large bay. The interior, also by Sarmiento, continues the same theme, including a mezzanine reached by a sweeping stair of floating treads cantilevered from a curving beam." -- Alan Hess, Googie Redux

Does Sarmiento count as a Googie architect, then?

Hell yes, deeply Googie, intrinsically Googie. They are the same commercial issues and solutions, the same attention-getting flamboyance and automobile-oriented scale and positioning as any John Lautner coffeeshop. "BBCA's 1959 First National Bank of Ontario in Uplands, California, with slanted roof and front facade, bore a strong resemblance to a restaurant drive-in. The sculptural period of bank design in the 1960s was well-suited to drive-by architecture." (This from Charles Belfoure's book Monuments to Money. )

(I have to point out that modernization cut both ways, though. BBCA and Sarmiento were responsible for a lot of drop ceilings.

Also from the Belfoure book: "Bankers equated modern merchandising with bright lighting and insisted on higher lighting levels... (In historic urban banks) balconies were enclosed to gain more space, and floors were covered with rubber tile. Marble check desks were replaced with lighter furniture. Bank architects such as the BBCA did an enormous amount of remodeling work... The modernizations, however, had a devestating effect on the historic fabric of the interiors of the banks, many of them constructed in the historical revival period. Bankers had enormous disdain for these 'mausoleums', as they called them, and after the war they wanted to obliterate any trace of the old... Banks immediately adopted the suspended ceiling, installing them below their ornate classical revival skylights, often covering up gold leaf detailing and skylights of great beauty...")

On February 24 2007 I dialed Mr. Sarmiento's number and spoke to him about this project. He's 84, he was patient and good-humored with questions from a stranger out of the blue.

Yes, true, according to Mr. Sarmiento, he was a draftsman under Oscar Niemeyer in the Brasilia period. Sarmiento traveled to various South American cities looking for a job as a young man, this office is where he succeeded. His stint in Niemeyer's office was a fairly short experience, and he was 'the last peon' draftsman in the ranks. His only contact with Niemeyer was one lunchtime, when the office was quiet, when he'd snuck into Niemeyer's office to look at designs, and got caught. "What are you doing?" Sarmiento explained himself, and avoided being fired on the spot.

Yes, true, the original project here was much larger: another tower, with its fenestration also attuned to the sun, and a shopping center. That accounts for the size of the three-story underground parking garage. The original developer was David Murdoch. Murdoch surrendered the project over to Western Savings; Western Savings had financial problems, and surrendered the project over to an owner primarily interested in collecting rents, so the building stopped.

As to those drive-throughs, of course they were part of the original design, and Mr. Sarmiento took out a copyright on those fiberglass umbrellas on the south side.

What about this building is he proudest of? Its originality. Nobody, he says, can point to another example or precedent for this shape.

Other work by Sarmiento, to put this into context:

This Phoenix Financial Center is one of the three buildings that Wenceslaus Sarmiento is proudest of from his long career. The other two are the astonishing 1963 Newport Balboa Savings Bank seen here, and the hypnotically gorgeous circular Chancery building next to the New Cathedral in St. Louis (below).

Sarmiento's single best-known building is probably the 1956 Glendale Federal Savings Bank, a 10-story Googie highrise in Glendale California that's been the object of a slow-motion preservation battle. According to web sources, his 1956 Fidelity Federal Savings & Loan Building, also in Glendale, is facing adaptive reuse to become a facility called The Animation Bank. You can find an excellent article on this building and the architect here by friend Ara Corbett.

In Arizona Sarmiento designed two more little branch banks.

One is in Phoenix, on the parking lot of the MetroCenter mall, the 1974 Western Savings which is now a salad restaurant. Some see this as a stylistic Polynesian conceit, but it was more like a disciplined response to the small site where highway visibility was important. More photos on this page.

And the other branch in Tucson, on the southwest corner of Broadway and South Randolph, now a Bank of America. Its plan is roughly like an eye, and the long curved surface faces the intersection with another 'eye' pattern as a concrete screen. Year unknown.

Sarmiento's office was also responsible for the building below, a branch of a department store called Stix Baer and Fuller, at the Westroads Plaza at the corner of Clayton and Brentwood, in Richmond Heights, suburban St. Louis Missouri. Opened in 1955. I realize this means very little to you, but it means a lot to me, the first modernist building that made an impression on 8-year-old me.

Back at the Phoenix Financial Center, as a side note, there's a concrete planter near Central, covering some of the mechanicals of the building, with the seals of the 15 Arizona counties embedded in the top, dinner-plate-sized.

The one for Maricopa County is funny / futuristic looking (below) with atomic symbol of the time. This seal may have been designed by Paul Coze in 1965. It's on his own list of commssions, and this would have been installed circa 1971.