Standing fairly close to downtown Scottsdale and the Maya Apartments, this former branch bank is in the Scottsdale club district.

In fact it's right across from Jenna Jameson's straining-for-notorious Pussy Cat Lounge, the scene of Mike Tyson jumping on some poor guy's car hood, and lately its primary function is as a parking lot for PCL or Myst customers. The club district is strange, man. In the day time, on foot, it looks like a series of sound stages and/or industrial park, anonymous, wide streets, not giving anything up, a place for stray dogs. On weekend nights there's searchlights and thumping music, the place looks better in the dark (who doesn't?), and clubs like Myst spend hundreds of thousands on interior design, room after room, and zip on the outside.

So anyway, Sir Speedy has been used as a weekend parking lot for all that scene, that's gotta be lucrative. At least up through May 24, 2006, when Sir Speedy moved out. Since then the W Hotel has set up temporary offices here while construction is going on half a block away.

No undying masterpiece, right, a little commercial building of no national interest, okay, but interesting and solid and sophisticated.

Like some other buildings in the neighborhood it shows signs of Bennie Gonzalez's influence from the 1968 Scottsdale City Hall and Library.

Like the City Hall, these are big, simple, white blocky forms assembled so they're still "humane", there's still a scale and a place for people to enter. Massive and thick-fingered but friendly. Like the City Hall, the relationship between inside and outside is interesting. The building exterior seems calculated to block out the sun -- the gratutiously massive overhang creates that impression, as if every square foot of sunshine weighs 3000 lbs -- but the inside is sunnier and more open than you'd expect. (Supposedly that was the main reason for the renovation of the Scottsdale Library; it was too dark inside.)

Most interestingly there's something about the details, the dimensions, the tilework and the arches, that suggests a generic, ethnic, southwestern, Meso-American style, perfect for the time and place.

Architect unknown. But a good one.