A year of living in Phoenix giveth and taketh away. It gives you the strange ability to smell water and soil, both of them smell pretty good, and an accumulating sense of spatial poverty. It starts with the natural setting, because the desert floor is flat, and trees scarce. The buildings also tend to be low and loose and legible at 40 MPH, and with little urban density and wide, wide suburban intersections and only a handful of pedestrian environments in the valley. No buildings ever press against your shoulders. Phoenix is a perfectly fine city to look at through the windshield. Oddly, and ironic considering the attractions of the climate, the best built environments in Phoenix are private, introverted, and literally guarded.

Fountains in the Green is an apartment complex close to downtown Phoenix, northeast at 14th Street and Thomas, actually fractured into seven different apartment groupings with seven different addresses. These photographs are of the courtyard of the main group. The buildings date from the 1950’s through the 2000’s – there’s new construction – but it reminds me most strongly of the 1970’s. The complex stands in what can be charitably described as a transitional neighborhood. A neighborhood with texture.

Because it’s guarded against the neighborhood, the many good things about Fountains in the Green are invisible from the outside, through the tangles of leaves growing up around the high security fences. Once you manage to talk your way through the defenses, you’ll feel the first unphotographable thing about Fountains in the Green: the amazing contrast between outside and inside.

Inside, it smells like both soil and water. And oxygen, the other novelty. Nobody can see in, you can’t see out – at least not from the central courtyard, with its fountain, deep blue pool, the Mayan look of the sauna, a complicated warren of winding paths, multilevel garden spaces, staggered and angled building placement, and artwork everywhere. It’s like San Diego in its generous, overgrown sub-tropical landscape plan in an enclave, a secluded place, with private rules. Big beams. Leaning retaining walls.

But the Fountains complex shares its major virtue with a lot of other 70’s apartment buildings. Not only did the California-led Zeitgeist of about 1973 through 1980 produce tequila sunrises and multicolored sculpted shag carpet and mood rings and lava lamps, but it also generated at least one architectural form with lasting value: these dense, livable apartment complexes. You can tell by the separation of parking lot and pedestrian space, and the fact that the buildings are planned closely around the capacities of the foolish man-animal. Fountains in the Green is a complex, green, rewarding environment, attractive as hell, and sexy, except let's just refine 'sexy' to mean 'making positive contact between people more possible'. The arrangement of space around this sauna, for instance, allows and encourages contact and intimacy, just like the arrangement of chairs in a classroom allows and encourages another set of roles and behaviors. Not only could this 70's apartment complex satisfy your thirst for a human-scale living environment, but it also promises the advantages of living in a densely packed and socially cooperative space, and seems capable of satisfying other thirsts of the foolish man-animal.