To get straight to the point, the Tempe Municipal Building was finished in 1971 and combines the most user-oriented architecture of its time with the most user-hostile architecture of its time, and the result is brilliant.

It's a big black monolith, an upside-down pyramid, an unholy totalitarian-looking thing.

The pyramid is in the worst tradition of the late 60s-early 70s, the big geometric solids, outsized, show-off, giant black-steel and black-glass toys strewn across the landscape. Much-decorated architect I.M. Pei was the main offender with this dumb "Big Shape" habit and his career is capped by the famous stunt of installing a glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre.

The best traditions of the late 60s-early 70s are the places actually designed around human capabilities and preferences and habits, pedestrian places, places that allow and encourage social interaction. Friendly places. That part is underground here. Better every time I think about it, the Tempe City Hall has it both ways.

You approach the pyramid with a sense of vague dread (like, a Kubrick moment) a satisfying spatial novelty in this otherwise conventional neighborhood. Its apex (or nadir, maybe) (or upended zenith) (maybe call it the zepex) is stuck into a concrete and dirt cradle.

Then you're led to discover the subterranean square. The pyramid works because the pyramid is surrounded by a subterranean pedestrian plaza, galleries of offices. It's hard to draw, but easily imaginable, easy to hold in the mind. As much about the plantings as anything. Then of course there are burbling fountains.

All this creates a kind of tension that resolves into welcome and harmony and it's really wonderful. And the inverted pyramid looks even more impressive from the courtyard underneath, looming over your field of vision like a DeadStar chunk.

There's a side tower, a fire exit.

It was actually Kemper Goodwin, longtime Tempe architect, and his movie-star-handsome son Michael. They lived closeby, close enough to stroll over to work every day.

The legend is that Michael had been mentally agonizing over the site, and the plan, and how to fit the floorspace needs of different city departments together, and in a flash of naked inspiration in a steamy shower solved the problem with a quick fingertip sketch on the shower door.

Aha!

Shower door or not, both Goodwins would certainly have been aware of I.M.Pei's 1977 Dallas City Hall, not a pyramid but includes a dramatically slanted façade, Boston City Hall, and the full-on upside-down-pyramid Oscar Niemeyer's 1955 Modern Art Museum in Caracas, unbuilt but well known. On the other hand you'd be surprised how little awareness architects have about each other's experiments. You'd think the field would be a little more like a science, like Science, where they'd cooperate and share information and each architect would build on the practical experience of all the others.... well you'd be trippin.

Shower door or not (whoops I said that already), Goodwin took this idea to his engineer, the solar expert. The thing about this building is that it creates its own deep shade. Lots of window area, it creates deep shade on its own windows and on the surrounding ground.

The solar expert on the project considered the idea, smiled, and made only one modification: he twisted the building 45 degrees, so there is a southern point rather than a southern face. According to the dedication phamplet the building "allows only 18% of the sun's heat to pass through the windows on the hottest summer day." Based on the sun's rays striking tangent to the western building face at 4:00 on an August day.

So if you want to talk about desert modernism, here it is. The Mountain Bell building of the same era makes an excellent comparison.

Charles T. Goodsell in his excellent The Social Meaning of Civic Space makes an interesting observation about the underground city council room, an Egyptian connection:

The floor plan at Tempe is shaped like a lopsided coffin. The fact that this space is underground at the point of a buried pyramid makes the likeness of a sarcophagus seem particularly apt. The room's official zone is, in fact, configured like the head of an Egyptian mummy case. Designs that are common in Egyptian funerary sculpture are, moreover, repeated in the space's sculpted ceiling and its illumination system. A 3-foot orb with twelve radiating arms, centered directly above the public lectern, quite literally puts the citizen who is addressing the council on the spot.

And according to the oral history of Bill and Betty Hanna, Tempe's longtime fire chief and his wife, Tempe Mayor Elmer Bradley was very much against the idea, to the point where he threatened to sue if they put his name on the plaque. They did. He didn't. Bradley had proposed a building at Rural and Southern at the same cost, but with three times the square footage. "The rest of the City Council were great friends of Kemper Goodwin who designed that. They were all buddy-buddies. Elmer wouldn’t even show up for the dedication of that."

In 1971, it received an award of excellence from the American Institute of Steel Construction, and in 1972 received an award of merit from the Western Mountain Region of the American Institute of Architects.