Among the best modern buildings in Phoenix.

Modern in the truest sense, striking and different but nothing phony or showy about it. That rhythmic waffle-roof rules in this context, and there's real taste and sensitivity at work here. True to its function, true to the spatial logic of its efficient concrete-shell structure, barely altered from its original 1961 configuration, well-loved, cared-for and healthy and in marvelous condition.

Inside the sanctuary, there's a comfortable community feeling from the 1960s, a space that feels like it helps to keep the congregation together, a space I find haunting because that spatial feeling of integrated and cooperative community was once so common and now I see how fragile these things are, how easy they are to crush.

With the obvious resemblance of form between this and Coronado High School, both the waffle roof and those thin-shell hyperbolic paraboloid stems poured on site, I was thinking this might also be a product of Ralph Haver. It's not. It's even better.

(Which came first? Hmmm, let me look -- well, the date I have on Coronado High School is 1960, and the plaque here is 1961. I'd call that a tie.)

The architect is a name you probably haven't heard: William D. Knight. Knight and his wife and daughter moved to Phoenix from Roswell, New Mexico. Knight had been a product of Texas Tech in Lubbock. He spent three or four productive years here, from November 1959 through 1963. (His daughter supplied this information.)

This is one of four larger projects he worked on during his few years in Phoenix. The Holy Cross Lutheran Church, and another less-dramatic but still beautiful Lutheran church somewhere, went just fine. The other two projects convinced him to leave town.

One of those was the City Center Motel. That outlandish design does what it was meant to do, catch your eye from the street. Despite its, oh let's just say it out loud, it's a crapola neighborhood around the City Center Motel, there's little hope for it, it would have to be entirely rebuilt, and it looks like it could fall down in a cloud of tubercular dust and poverty-spores, hold your breath when it does, not if. And it's a visual composition meant to be appreciated at 35 MPH.

Knight designed it and unfortunately, his daughter says, his client didn't feel like paying him. Knight ended up in court, it went slow, it was costly.

On the bright side, the City Center Motel is one of the 25 projects chosen by the city (Barbara Stocklin) to represent photogenic mid-Century architecture.

The other problem commission was a local public school. Knight had noticed (light bulb) that it was hot in Phoenix, not every architect acts on that information, so good for him. Like every other right-thinking American of the time, Knight also had his attention drawn to the potential of the Russian Army and was kind of an expert on bomb-shelter construction. This was the Cold War era when the Jack Stewarts were keeping colorful anti-communist literature in the Camelback Inn rooms right next to the Gideon Bible. William Knight puts all these facts together and says, Hey!

Hey! he says. Hey hey!

Let's build the school underground! You automatically get integral shade! It's cool down there! You automatically get protection from Russian bombs dropping out of the sky! Soil absorbs radiation, kids safe! And you leave the desert landscape alone! This is another tip-off that Knight was a good & worthy architect, his willingness to advance the design into unknown territory (in this case, into the ground) make his project invisible if the conditions suggested it. (And maybe this is the ideal profile for desert architecture, huh, no profile at all.)

Knight got the green light, spent a lot of time on preparing the drawings, then some small-minded administrator on the school board realized that this was unusual and therefore could not happen. Knight's daughter recalls that there was a big flap, resignations, problems, controversy. Another expensive failure and a true shame we don't have a mid-Century underground public school in Phoenix to show off. All on account of cowardice.

The expense and bad feeling of these two projects chased him out of town. It was a loss for us. He went to greener pastures in Farmington New Mexico and Window Rock, serving for awhile as the chief architect of the Navajo Nation with work in Window Rock and another church in Fort Defiance. Then Colorado. He died in 1992.

The pastor here remembers that the church was built when nothing else was around, with the exception of the "Peaceful Valley" subdivision south of here, built up in 1955. There are photographs taken from the roof, off towards Camelback, showing the valley in its heartbreaking 1961 emptiness.

The tower is two concrete slabs, complicated curves that come together in a complicated way, a sculpted object of considerable grace.

Knight wife, Elfleda, had her own set of accomplishments, but they collaborated on the sculpture of the altar stone here. It's soft, might be soapstone. They carved it together and gold-leafed the carving and their daughter, quietly observing them work together as a child, now remembers a moment of being so proud of her parents, how talented they both were.