NowPhoenix

Architecture

Architecture in Phoenix

Phoenix sits in the Sonoran Desert, where sun and heat set the terms and a building is judged on how it handles them. Frank Lloyd Wright made his winter base here and worked out a desert language others in the city kept arguing with.

• Sandra Day O’Connor U.S. Courthouse

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  Completed 2000

  Richard Meier

  A federal courthouse downtown, set behind a five-storey glass wall. Richard Meier placed the round courtroom as a free-standing drum inside a great glazed atrium, shaded from the sun by a projecting steel brise-soleil. The atrium is left unconditioned at its edges, working as a shaded outdoor room in a climate that rarely allows one. It is Meier's white-and-glass language tested against desert heat rather than a temperate coast.

• Burton Barr Central Library

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  Completed 1995

  Will Bruder

  The main city library at the north edge of downtown. Will Bruder wrapped a simple copper and glass box in ribbed metal the colour of the surrounding rock, and canted the two long walls like a mesa cut by a canyon. Skylights are set to drop a shaft of sun onto the top-floor reading room at midday. It treats a library as a piece of desert engineering as much as a civic room.

• Taliesin West

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  Founded 1937

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and studio in the desert foothills, and the school he ran from it. He began it in 1937 and kept building it by hand with his students until his death, so it has no single completion, its walls of local rock set in concrete under low roofs angled to the light. Everything is pitched down to the desert floor and the mountains behind. It is the built manifesto of an architecture drawn from its own ground.

• Tovrea Castle

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  Completed 1931

  Alessio Carraro

  A tiered white house on a desert rise east of downtown, built as the centrepiece of a resort that never followed. Alessio Carraro, a sheet-metal man from San Francisco with no architect, shaped it himself as a wedding cake of diminishing floors ringed by one of the largest cactus gardens ever planted. He sold it within a year, and the Tovrea family kept it as a home. It survives as the folly of a man who built his own landmark and lost it.

• Arizona Biltmore

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  Completed 1929

  Albert Chase McArthur

  A resort hotel north of downtown, built from patterned concrete blocks cast on site. Albert Chase McArthur designed it using the textile-block system of his former employer Frank Lloyd Wright, whose exact role in the result was disputed for decades after. The blocks carry a geometric relief drawn from a palm trunk, so the ornament comes out of the structure itself. It fixed the desert-resort image the city has traded on ever since.