Walt Lockley

Richard Meier's Memorial to His Own Aesthetic Part XXII

	Phoenix gets hot in the summertime. The distilled wisdom of the ages says buildings in intense sun are well-served by deep, shady verandas, thick walls, deep sills and shadowing eaves, to produce integral shade. Most Phoenician buildings designed by smart people cooperate with the climate and defend themselves against that relentless punishing ball of fire in the sky. After awhile, a Phoenician develops the ability to quickly glance at a building and guess the wasted BTU's per hour. Prowl slowly in your SUV past the glassy expanses of the Sandra Day O'Connor Federal Courthouse on Washington Street in downtown Phoenix, a huge proud glassy surface, with a void inside as lofty and empty as an airplane hangar, and you think, hum, that's either brave or stupid. I wonder what their air conditioning bills are like.
When you find out this is a Richard Meier building, and it doesn't even have air conditioning, you might vote for 'brave'. But no, the O'Connor Courthouse is not air conditioned, and it can get over 105 degrees inside the building over the summer, making it hell on the guards and secretaries trying to work inside, making a tough job miserable. And the giant glass shell of the O'Connor frames the most heavily defended, secured and user-hostile "public space" I've ever wanted to bolt from. This building makes me angry. There are important things to learn here, in case you or I are ever called on to shepherd a $102M federal courthouse project through six years of development, damn it.
	This building is the story of the GSA's very real and very honorable wise intentions to create distinguished buildings. Things don't work all the time. Buildings are hard. They're different every time. But this is also the story of atrocious decisions and a result so terrible nobody wants to even talk about it: a white elephant, a failure that condemns the entire system that created it, the Heaven's Gate of architecture. Word has it that Meier's entourage first arrived from the east coast in 1994 to discover basically nobody on the street in downtown Phoenix. Not sure why that was a surprise. Phoenix is maybe THE prototypical post-war automotive city, and then there's that punishing flaming sky-ball and the 120 degree sidewalk temps.
Meier and the project champion, a Federal judge named Broomfield, saw this as a chance to give Phoenix an indoor gathering place, a plaza, a civic asset. In the words of the project lead, Thomas Phifer (quoted in the New Times), "We took a look around and found that no one was occupying public space in Phoenix. No one was outdoors. No one was even under a tree… We felt we needed to make an offering to the city in the way of a significant urban room, a shaded space where people could come as a respite." Oh! We can go there and respite if we want! Or maybe they have rock concerts in there.
	If you haven't been watching Richard Meier's career closely, you may not realize he's been building the same photogenic structure over and over. From the High Museum in Atlanta onwards, it's been white, it's glass, it's airy. Sort of a bad habit. It's this purity thing. All of Meier's public buildings carry his signature as a 'sculptor of light', (giving Thomas Kincaid a run for his money I guess). In order to adapt his patented white glass "Richard Meier" box in this punishing heat, Richard Meier proposed a bold experiment in color and a dramatic departure from his expansive, glass-curtain-wall solution. Well, no, I take that back. He didn't do that. When confronted by the Phoenix climate, Richard Meier found himself unable to disregard this white-glass-box that's been following him around his whole career like a loyal puppy. Maybe he can't help it. Maybe he's stuck.
He built the same damn building again.
	Your user experience will depend on the day's weather. Okay, a lot of big buildings have climate problems, but the weather inside this building is a large, perverse joke in itself, a rich vein of Comedy Gold, I can't even remember it all: the roof misters (aka 'World's Largest Swamp Cooler') create killing heat in the summertime and an unacceptable chill in the winter, dust storms blow through the building unimpeded, and in an expensive retrofit the engineers found (if I have this right) that the misters create particles perfectly sized to transmit Legionnaire's disease.
No need to dwell on these entertaining failures, except this is an excellent way for the architect to send the message to its users, "If you expected a livable environment, you can go screw yourself." Would you feel happy, or feel treated fairly, if you worked in a building that ordinarily got 100 degrees inside?
	So step inside, if you can get in. When I went to the O'Connor, uninvited, I had to explain my reasons to the skeptical guards at the metal detector, surrender my new beloved digital camera to them, walk over and sign in at the GSA office, explain myself and my reasons again, explain which parts of the building I needed access to, fill out some paperwork, have my driver's license photocopied, retrieve my camera from the guards at the metal detector, walk through the metal detector, and have my fresh new paperwork gloweringly scrutinized. Only then would they turn me loose in the atrium lobby.
(My paperwork also gave me temporary license to photograph the outside of the building, which is verboten otherwise. Just imagine that. Orwell would be proud. You're legally prevented from photographing the outside of a public courthouse.) (So any recent immigrant from a totalitarian regime, and for a mental image we can use a doe-eyed 17-year-old North Korean fresh off the bus carrying a shabby valise, this guy might suppose that an American citizen would be free to walk into the Sandra Day O'Connor Courthouse. You can practically hear him purring to himself, "It's a public building, built with everybody's money," as he's walking in, right before the guards start shouting at him to stop and punching him in the neck.)
	The main experience is the Void. The entrance is on the northeast corner, under a complicated canopy, and as you step into this huge Void, you're aware of what you can glimpse from outside. It's an impressive, vast, single room, with the dimensions and hush of an aircraft hangar. Yeah, I know I said that twice, but look, it's impressive. It has the vibe of a great public space. The ceiling is 120 feet above you. The ultra-high ceiling means every conversation in the atrium is a public one. Glancing up, you see the corridor railings of the slender office block, and people leaning over the railings. One of the minor satisfactions of the O'Connor is the way lawyers and office workers dangle their elbows off the railings of their cell block, and stare down into the Void to check out the visitors.
Congratulations! You're in the justice system.
	The O'Connor leads your eye upward, forever tugging on your sleeve and saying, "Look how big I am, pal, and look how small you are." This building has David Mamet's cadence. It's almost as if it seeks to make you uncomfortable and off-balance so the justice system can work on you better. Maybe they should call it the Tenderizer. It induces that exposed insignificant feeling, it's out of scale, and it's a Void rather than a lobby because in all this vast space the Void is seatless, except for an arrangement of tall 10-minute lunch stools and four comfortable chairs hidden in an afterthought in one corner. By design it's not a building that allows you to hang around at all. It's not scaled or configured to allow for hanging around. And then there's this floor, this wide, solid, glossy floor. In the Void, the only surface available to you is the floor. A modern building like the Will Bruder Public Library, a natural counterexample down the street, gives the visitor some tactile help, but in the O'Connor you kind of make friends with the floor, at least I did, because there's nothing else to touch, and there's so damned much floor to deal with. It's like a lake. To its credit, this floor is a genuine urban thrill worthy of Chicago.
Behind you a single sheet of glass looms, lurks, towers, stands on end 120 feet up like a dangerous circus trick. You think, look, all this glass, all these surfaces, the curious surface-tension between its open structure and its closed nature, the hardness of its surfaces and its tenuous membrane, its place in the city and its non-relationship to the street, the O'Connor is a glass balloon ready to be popped. Just the difference in air pressure could do it. It's a building prepped for the last scene in a Jackie Chan movie, a suicidal adolescent building longing for its own destruction. Is it unpatriotic to say so? Is it even legal to say so? Is it legal to point out that this place is explosive?
	And finally, to scope out a bit and locate the O'Connor in the urban fabric: a few Phoenicians are still aware of that long-cherished dream of linking the sorta-healthy downtown to the obviously wheezing capitol district, a few blocks west along Washington. The success of a "capitol corridor" hinged on the faint hope of building up an urban pedestrian network. Of course the O'Connor's brutal block-long relationship to the street swiftly kicks that dream in the pants. Now it won't be possible for decades. From the inside, the dramatically tall north curtain-wall frames the mundane streetscape and the new Dodge Theatre across Washington in a funny, overly dramatic way. From the outside, from the street, the joke turns grim.
All of Richard Meier's outrageous monochrome selfishness would be forgivable, the climate problems wouldn't be worth talking about, we could look past its intimidations and dysfunction and hostilities and irresponsible expense, if only it succeeded on its own star-architect turf - if only it was a good symbol. This "shaded space where people can come as a respite," this public plaza nobody is allowed to visit, this Void is the opposite of the building we needed in this place. Whether the O'Connor was merely selfish or purposely cruel, it's an act of Meier's ego in which you, lucky you, participate in the role of trespassing supplicant and citizen of a glassy authoritarian Oz.