The Vale development on University Drive in Tempe, finished in 2005, designed by William P. Bruder.

As Bruder's career expands balloon-wise and he becomes more authoritative, him with his national reputation, his international reputation (surely somebody in Nogales has heard of him), he'll enjoy a hail of squishy rotten onions and hard little bitter oranges thrown at his back if he fails to solve all of Tempe's pressing social and technical problems simultaneously and with an aesthetic flourish, because that's what 'authority' means and that's how 'architectural criticism' works. Bruder has to accomplish six major things all at once, bounce with elegance on an N-dimensional tightrope, and still keep moving forward with good humor, that's the only thing we ask.

So, good. Onions ready, small bitter oranges plentiful in the street.

Today we're holding Bruder accountable for these six small matters: design a building that will safely stand up, make it all work economically which is the most important thing for 80-90-95-98% of project participants, choose materials and massing that satisfy longlasting social superstitions about Order and Permanence and "Honest Expression of Structure" (gack), accomplish environmental responsibility and sustainability in the desert climate, single-handedly transform the loose & vague & hopelessly auto-oriented terrain vague of urban Arizona into a pedestrian wonderland while respecting the character of the neighbors, and create a humane environment that encourages social interactions for the residents so they become part of a strong supportive instant community and extended family and dating pool. Oh, and great views.

Facts first: there are 46 residential units here in The Vale, ranging from 622 to 2,263 square feet, on the corner of University and Beck, a few blocks west of ASU. Asking price last year was in the range of $320,900 - 537,800, those figures coming from Scott Jarson.

The name "Vale" comes from the same reference from Ovid that the city name "Tempe" comes from. (Just a note to some of the real estate guys out there: "Ovid" is the poet, "Metamorphoses" is the poem. It's just the one name, "Ovid". Like "Cher." Right.)

The configuration is a line of seven three-story buildings bravely facing the street, including some street-level street-oriented retail space on University (and looking like the circus came to town; we'll get back to that) and a parallel line of two-story buildings inside, alongside, bordering the alley. Garage underneath. The angle of the monopitch roof is continued from the two-story structures to the three-story, which subtly helps position and orient the buildings to each other and towards the street, a spatially subtle tactic that, a la Lebowski, ties the whole development together.

Between, ah, between the buildings, is a suggested sort of pedestrian street or private promenade or gauntlet, onto which all kinds of hopes and dreams have been projected, one of which comes from the marketing material: you're looking at a "richly landscaped common area". Yeah?

About designing a building that will safely stand up, that's a matter of state law and consulting engineers and a topic well worth talking about when it doesn't happen correctly. The best an engineer can hope for is to do his-or-her job well and become completely invisible.

About making the project work economically, the Vale evidently works economically. I hope it does. For most projects, most of the time, the whole grand complicated architectural equation is solved only for these first two constraints and to hell with the rest of it. Which is only smart in the short term.

Style next. That's the easy one. The matter of "choosing materials and massing that satisfy longlasting social superstitions about Order and Permanence and Honest Expression of Structure".

I had heard that it was quite green, an obnoxious lime green, an eyeball-damaging green, and that's true, but not the whole truth.

Bruder is developing a Signature Style, so you can drive down the street and spot "a Bruder" from three stoplights away. In Bruder's case it's the consistent use of metal skins and perforated metal panels and judicious curves, and a certain kind of, oh, I don't know what you'd call it. Aggressive whimsy, maybe. Design-y willingness to attract attention and be closely examined. The thing looks Italian to me, spare and bratty.

I have a small problem with those random square windows all over the place. I'm trying to think of where I've seen them before.

As to the color choices, pleasantly obnoxious, just irritating enough to provoke a laugh when it hits your eyes the first time. It's not the green that's jarring, it's the clashing combination of that green and that orange, along with the regular / irregular vertically-enphasized punch-card-looking facades that face University, the formal variations in the way the pieces fit together, and it's all a jarring contrast with the surrounding car-oriented horizontally-pitched anonymous contet. It looks urban. You can't help wondering what it is.

Order and Permanence? Check. Is it an "honest expression of materials"? Check. Does it look like what it is? Check, yes, it has economy and definition. Is it like nobody else's work? Check. Is it beautiful? Well it's unforgettable and -- yeah. Yeah, it is beautiful. I guess, that quality of beauty you've never seen before and makes you a little uncomfortable.

Bruder is very smart about materials and the climate and sun-orientation. He's looked around and realized he's in the desert, putting him ahead of many other designers in the valley.

There's a recent small flap in the local alternative weekly about "Haute Houses" and the appropriate amount of window space for buildings out here in the desert, the trade-off between visibility and heat gain. Part of the conversation is about the O'Connor Courthouse as a sort of worst-case-study. Typically the alternative weekly is getting the details wrong and hyperventilating about the wrong thing and they attack Bruder, if they mean to attack Bruder (and they do) (because he is now an authority figure), where Bruder is strongest.

There's more to being green than having low electric bills, I know, I know, but in terms of shading the glass and avoiding the sun and keeping the air conditioning bills down, there's good design here at the Vale. You'll notice on that top photo that the southern sun-facing windows (on the wall to the right) are tiny, and the north-facing windows are a lot larger. Bruder studied with Soleri and is credited with the highly energy-efficient Burton Barr. Environmentally responsible? Check. Good design for the desert?

......Hold that thought.

As to the whole urban fabric requirement, about remaking Phoenix into a civilized pedestrian wonderland on the order of, say, Jan Gehl's Copenhagen, first let's point out that the Vale is right down the street from the ASU university campus, from the Mill and University intersection.

As you know Phoenix is not a walker's paradise. The urban fabric of Phoenix is rough and loose like burlap, a thread count of 1 per inch, meant for cars and totally car-permeable, virtually impossible to get around on foot, and the opposite of dense. You take your life in your hands walking to the grocery store. I believe, but can't prove, that it lowers your IQ.

To adopt Bruder's cadence for a moment, "Phoenix is a big suburb. Okay?"

To my mind the words "pedestrian" and "civilized" always go together. The shape of auto-dominated Phoenix neighborhoods affect human relationships, prevent community feeling, eventually works out to punishing isolation. In all of the Valley, all of the vast six-largest-city MSA sweep of Scottsdale and Glendale and Peoria and Tempe and Chandler and Fountain Hills and Cave Creek and Carefree, there are, like, five or six public urban places with any kind of substance and character suitable for walking around: around the town square in downtown Glendale, the Civic Center and Old Town in Scottsdale, downtown Phoenix (although that's a toss-up), and around the state university in Tempe. Maybe another couple. That's it.

That kind of terrain vague, by the way, is hard to photograph, because by definition it's something that's not there, but the photograph above gives you some flavor of how The Vale stands out against its surroundings. The Vale might as well have a blinking neon sign, "DENSITY HERE." I wish it did.

In any other American city the ASU campus would be the nucleus of a walkable university district with bookstores and resale shops and coffee shops and bars and record shops and ethnic restaurants and people with the energy and the flexible schedules and the cultural resources and enough sense of community to make a neighborhood. There is something like that in Tempe, but one glance at that photograph and you might be able to tell that it's... not dense enough.

The Vale seems to me a totally legitimate effort to plant a dense urbanized outpost next to ASU. Maybe it'll be a seed, a contagion. I think that concept is a major driver of this project, Bruder taking on a design responsibility that extends out beyond the property line. This is amid a lot of pedestrianization talk in 2006 Phoenix triggered by light rail and an expectation, a hope, a bit of wishful thinking, that light rail will usher in some kind of urban Renaissance.

In a recent lecture he talked about the urban effect of the mandated minimum 40-foot turning radius of the largest possible fire engine at intersections for "safety" reasons. That's a good data point. Tempe is not only car-oriented, it's fire-engine-oriented, and Bruder rails against that. Big-scale urban effect is the most respectable and wonderful thing about The Vale.

So a report card for Mr. Bruder would look like this:

Building standing up: A.
Economic viability: B+ at least
Style: A+
Environmental responsibility: B+
Contribution to urban density: A+

But there's one last thing. Having gone all this way, after doing so many difficult things so well, it almost seems cruel-spirited or out of bounds to deliver the frustrating and puzzling last grade. Out of courtesy I would leave it off, if it wasn't the most important, the highest risk, the greatest reward, and the thing that distinguishes worthy buildings from selfish ones.

It's the user experience. And for user experience, the Vale gets a D.

"User experience" means how a place looks and feels, if the space is physically accommodating to humans ("humane"), and what kind of social pattern it creates. Buildings create social patterns that have a subtle but pervasive impact on people, especially young people. The shapes of buildings wordlessly suggest our degree of control, how we treat each other, how we tell 'us' from 'them', and how, and if, we interact with each other.

Looking down at that interior promenade, it looks vaguely European, and its curves and scale look like a calculated social space. It appears to reference, I don't know, Sardinia or Apulia or Ibiza, name your own pet semi-private human-scale pedestrian Euro-street reference. You could almost visualize a party or gathering of some kind down there. This common social space almost suggests a kind of community.

And that's a welcome gesture.

But does it work?

Have a close realistic look at it. (If possible, you should have a visit, since these photos inherently tend to glamorize and order the real spatial experience. The Machine Eye cannot take it in.)

You only have to ask yourself, "Would I hang out here?" Even if you're well dressed and fashionably soaking up an icy vodka tonic?

Personally I couldn't for more than eight minutes. There's nowhere to sit, there's nothing to look at except your neighbors' private parts, it is closed off from the street with metal security gates, and you'd instantly get red bubbling welts should you brush up against those perforated metal panels in the summer. Like his one-time maestro Soleri, Bruder hasn't realized that hot surfaces count. They burn. It's part of the user experience, going to the hospital. For five months out of the year in Phoenix, that interior street is not suitable for humans because of the baking, steaming, broiling, inescapable, punishing, murderous hot hot heat. Hard to be vodka-tonic-looking-to-hook-up-sexy at the emergency room.

Why such a bad grade on user experience?

Maybe this stylized Sardinian street is meant for show, not for use. It's cynical to believe this was only meant to be photogenic, only meant to satisfy the publicists, and I don't believe that.

Maybe it's because nobody knows how to create a humane design? For your sake we can skip the backstory about the socially-conscious movement in architecture from the late 1960s, socially-conscious in both senses of the word, a movement that included a lot of research on fitting the environment to human needs and preferences, a movement that unfortunately resulted in a bunch of dated-looking embarrassing 70's pedestrian malls that were torn out, a movement now as venerated as toe socks and Pet Rocks and home fondue kits. The high point of that movement was probably the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland. The neglected legacy of that movement is the skill of attending to human scale, color, appropriate lighting, views and sightline management, ample seating, natural materials, shade and foliage, water features, and spatial variety. So it's not like nobody knows how to build a human habitat.

Maybe there was shade and foliage and a fountain and seating in the original plan? Yeah, maybe. Those kinds of amenities are usually the first to get cut from the budget.

(more to come)