I get a funny feeling in Sedona, surrounded by all those gorgeous red rocks and that deep photogenic sky, that the real Sedona is actually about 100 yards away from wherever I'm standing at the moment, that the elusive center of Sedona weaves and dances just out of my reach.

On a highway map the locus of Sedona is plain enough, it's the Y junction of Highways 89 and 179, but the most charming thing about that is three small black-and-white Hopi clowns mockingly supervising the intersection from the roof of the corner Texaco.

The "energy vortexes" in Sedona are no help in establishing a sense of place. Nobody can agree on how many there are, or where they are, or who found them, which is no great surprise. The vortices cloud men's minds and warp your funny old ideas about accuracy and objectivity, which belong in another dimension of time and space. If you're looking for accuracy, don't put your head inside a vortex.

(Okay, for the record, this web site has a map of the five vortexes and an explanation that James Randi would not approve of but which is helpful and friendly.)

You could make the case that the center of Sedona has been taken away and is stored, not in the Indiana Jones government warehouse of Bible stories, but in the basement of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning came to Sedona in 1946, chased out of New York City by the wicked tongue of Peggy Guggenheim (to whom, unfortunately, Ernst was still married), and lived there for eight happy years. Sedona was still wild and remote in the late 1940s. Ernst assembled a monumental sculptural group as a sort of household guardian, a Picasso-Minotaur king-and-consort or king-and-sorceress, assembled out of car junk and spare parts, then covered over with concrete. The scepter is a stack of milk bottles. It is called Capricorn.

For my money this sculptural group is a deeply resonant comment on the half-mythic and half-comical Sedona landscape, and if it were still there, Capricorn would be the natural center of the town.

Ernst and Tanning moved away in 1954, back to France. Oh, there was some niggling dispute about his citizenship. Biographies of Max Ernst can give you lots of practice reading between the lines. He returned in 1963 to create a plaster mold of the concrete sculpture, which was later destroyed, and he later produced six bronze casts of the reworked, simplified, de-contextualized sculpture, one of which sits in the basement of the Neue Nationalgalerie. Few of the current citizens of Sedona know or would give a Canadian nickle for Max Ernst, which is a shame. Their house is still standing and could use some attention.

Anyway Sedona today has no discernable center, and fewer major destinations than a series of minor traps, some less painful (ice cream, crystal shops, jeep tours) than others (timeshare predators, new age galleries and spas and healing centers). While standing choosing from among the Pink Jeep Tour, the Fragile Mother Earth Tour and the Hummer Tour, wondering at the inherent paradox of "Fragile Mother Earth Tour", you might begin to think, if you're me, why it is that the mystical cultural capitals of Santa Fe and Sedona are so car-oriented. As a pedestrian experience Sedona is equivalent to Wisconsin Dells or Lake of the Ozarks or the Canadian side of Niagra Falls or any other tourist trap, with a prettier background. Any imaginable mystical good-ju-ju experience is instantly negated when you succumb to the bad-ju-ju of climbing back inside an automobile, even if you carefully leave the window down. The good-ju-ju just laughs and dances out of reach.

All of which brings us smilingly, gratefully, happily, wonderfully, mindfully, to Tlaquepaque. Tlaquepaque is an open-air collection of galleries close to that Y intersection.

It's a mall, actually. Ironic that this is the place with the most heart and soul in Sedona.

An artists' mall.

Tlaquepaque is the creation of one Abe Miller, who developed it in 1973 more or less on the model of an authentic Mexican village called San Pedro Tlaquepaque, close to Guadalajara. The architectural style is Spanish colonial made into an architectural toy. You park your car at the perimeter, grateful, if you're me, to get out of your car, and drift irresistably down this set of toy streets, the Calle Independencia, the Patio de la Capilla, the Patio de las Campanas, the Avenue de la Cute, etc.

There's a total but painless separation of pedestrian traffic and car traffic. Good job forgotten nameless planner, thank you.

(The Kamal Amin book about Taliesin says that whenever FLW approached one of his completed houses and found a photographer at work, he would wave his cane and shout out, "The Machine Eye cannot take it in!" It's a reminder that FLW came up before photographic reproduction and mass image replication became widespread (incredible when you think about it), and referred to cameras in this antique-and-rightfully-suspicious way, and it's a cane-shaking reminder from the master himself that ALL photographs represent ALL architectural experience deceptively at best, miserably false at worst.)

And there's something else here. Tlaquepaque is a haptic experience, an inherently playful architectural experience. It has everything to do with the pleasures of shape, and the pleasures of fitting between those shapes, or climbing on top of them.

These spaces and shapes, interlocking and overlapping, accomodate human bodies almost like furniture. Tuscan hill towns and medieval walled cities are haptically attractive in the same way (on a far grander scale, I know, I know), with narrow passages and multiple levels and complicated density, and signs of age and use and human habit, the curves and the angles and the shade. To me, this place is a lot like a good game, and living in car-oriented Phoenix makes me thirsty for haptic effects like these.

Separately there's the pleasure of being designed for, of knowing there's an originating intelligence and having a sort of conversation with that unknown designer, of knowing there's a pattern here of some kind to find. Like the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland, Tlaquepaque is a place that seems to conspire with you to explore it. And like the Ira Keller Fountain, Tlaquepaque is a product of the high-water-mark of user-oriented architecture in the United States, the 1970s.

But it's a mall. Even the most beautiful piece of propaganda is inseparable from its political purpose. If you feel pleasure here, you're being manipulated.

But that's okay.