The best parts of the ASU campus were built in the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. About 30% of this large, large campus is an open-air museum of mid-Century experiments, maybe twelve very good and/or very odd buildings, and one very good recent one by the smiling Eddie Jones.

The best and oddest is the Grady Gammage Auditorium, one of the last Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, dated 1964. (Wright left his planet in 1959.)

This Gammage either looks like a wedding cake with arms, or a smart little sombrero that George Cukor might have put on Rosalind Russell's head as she clips in from stage left, yacking, a sombrero eight stories tall, a sombrero with welcoming arms. It's pink. Officially the Gammage is 'desert rose' but it's really pinker than hell and everybody knows it. The general opinion seems to be that it's ugly -- or as my friend Bisser blurted out, "hideous!" As if the ghost of George Cukor had pinched his ass.

Originally designed as the Baghdad Opera House (which sort of undermines the whole "organic architecture" argument but whatever, we all knew that was specious anyway) and quite clever inside, very good acoustics and traffic management, a floorplan like this:

...where the intersection of the two circles is the threshold of the stage. All the backstage business, dressing rooms and storage, is nested into the smaller circle. The, uh, "Grand Tier" seating is situated above the main-floor seating on a box truss supported on either end, which means that the people on the floor have an unobstructed view, plus those in the last rows of floor seating have a void vaulting up above them, spatially entertaining and acoustically beneficial. They say.

I've heard conflicting reports about the acoustics.

It's both dated and has a strange retrofuturistic quality, like it fell out of history. This is where I first got the notion that you could date a building from its landscaping choices -- there's a lot of blue spruce out there in the yard. Plus the Gammage has had a cadre of post-occupation problems: expensive miscalculations with the garage addition (yeah, a garage for their orchestra shell, a garage built 6 inches too small, rebuilt, and then found to be largely unnecessary). Truckers, who curse the long, long, curved subterranean freight bays and refuse to use 'em. They'd be full of dead leaves if Tempe had leaves. And the carpet put in at renovation, which shocks patrons with its ugliness and the blue sparks of an all-wool static thrill.

But the experience of walking up to the Gammage is completely different. It sits… on a great site, let's leave it like that. It looms like an old pink monster-matron. But it's the sort of ugliness that comes with gravitational pull, and before you know it, you're looking up from underneath those ornamental curves inside the high arches. From across the street these look like ineffectual little scallops. But from underneath, they become convincing stylized drapery, a theatrical touch, building a real sense of anticipation. Those big curved lampposts are dreamlike. And once you get inside, you're going to have a great experience.