The 22-mile South Mountain Freeway completes the Loop 101 and Loop 202 system circumnavigating the Phoenix area. Meeting the Arizona Department of Transportation’s January 1, 2020, deadline was just one of many achievements of this challenging project. While researching it for an Engineering News Record story, I was able to ride and walk part of the mileage with members of the joint venture of Fluor Enterprises Inc., Ames Construction Inc. and Granite Construction Co. This was during the scorching Phoenix summer, but that half day was vital. Another challenge for the contractors was blasting through four small granite hills. In one section sacred to the Native Americans, the land was blessed by a community leader, and no rubble from the blast could leave the area, inspiring the contractors to repurpose it for embankments and substrate.

Frederick ‘Fred’ Weaver, FAIA (1912–1968) cofounded the distinguished Phoenix architectural firm, Weaver & Drover. The successor, DWL Architects + Planners Inc., celebrated its 70^th anniversary in 2019. The firm designed significant Arizona buildings: Phoenix Sky Harbor International Terminals 2, 3 and 4 (1962– and with Lescher & Mahoney Architects, 1979 and 1990); the Chapel at the Arizona State Hospital (1963), also in Phoenix; Arizona State University’s Charles Trumbull Library and Pedestrian Mall (1966); and Valley National Bank branches, the most famous at 44^th Street and Camelback Road (1968) in Phoenix. “Weaver & Drover . . . delivered well-designed commercial, institutional and governmental commissions throughout the Phoenix area . . . done with a confident, sophisticated and elegant touch,” says Doug Sydnor, FAIA.

Look anywhere in the Valley and you’ll read the late Reginald Gene Sydnor, AIA, signature: the 1957 Motorola Governmental Electronics Plant, Scottsdale; 1960 ASU Hiram Bradford Farmer Education Building, Tempe; 1969 St. Luke’s Hospital and Medical Center Major Expansion, Phoenix; and six homes from the 1960s and 1970s. The native of Bellpoint, West Virginia, pioneered post-World War II Phoenix architecture, with notables such as Edward L. Varney, a principal of Varney Sexton Sydnor Architects with whom Sydnor worked for much of his Phoenix career. During 42 years of practice, most in Arizona from 1955 to 1991, “Reg” (“Redge”) completed 250 projects in Arizona, Washington and California. Sydnor’s architectural legacy continues with one of his sons, Doug, who says, “He went through life with the utmost integrity, delivered every promise without exception and brought balanced judgment and fairness to every situation.”

Ralph Haver (1915-1987), AIA, was both architect and builder, designing tract and custom homes, military and multifamily housing, neighborhoods, churches, schools, banks, municipal buildings and malls. He pioneered the new Phoenix following World War II, as GIs returned home and Easterners and Midwesterners found warm climate, A/C and new opportunities in the Southwest. Haver-designed homes in North Phoenix neighborhoods such as Canal North (1946), Marlen Grove (1953), Windemere (1955), and Scottsdale’s Town & Country III (1963) are gentrifying and bringing high resale values. “Ralph Haver was . . . able to deliver inspiring and modestly elegant residential designs on a massive scale, improving the quality of life for tens of thousands of families in the Southwest,” says Alison King, a Phoenix designer and historian who founded and maintains ModernPhoenix.net, a superlative source for Mid-Century Modern resources in Arizona.

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, on June 8, 1867, and died in Scottsdale, Arizona, April 9, 1959. So many masterpieces celebrate his legacy: the Frederick C. Robie House (1908−10), Chicago; Taliesin (1911−1959), Wisconsin; Fallingwater (1935), Mill Run; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1959), New York City; and National Historic Landmark Taliesin West (1937−1959), Scottsdale. To celebrate the sesquicentennial, members of Arizona Residential Architects (ARA) offer their insights. Also responding is Victor E. Sidy, AIA LEED AP, former head of school and dean at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and now principal of Victor Sidy Architect in Phoenix. “At the core,” Sidy explains, “his work is a search for an architecture that uplifts the human spirit: an architecture that humanizes its environment, surrounds us with joy and makes us aware of the remarkable place and time we inhabit.” 

Swaback Partners, Scottsdale, is many achievements: master-planned communities and cities, such as the 5,000-acre Village of Kohler in Wisconsin (1976–92) and the 8,300-acre DC Ranch in North Scottsdale; nonresidential work such as the paper-airplane-inspired Hangar One Jet Facility at the Scottsdale Airpark; the firm’s oasis headquarters, The Studio, also in Scottsdale; and innovative community clubhouses throughout the West, including the LEED Silver lodge at Martis Camp near Lake Tahoe; and residential showpieces such as principal Vernon Swaback’s desert-embracing Skyfire in the high desert of north Scottsdale. One of Frank Lloyd Wright last apprentices, Swaback, FAIA, with partners John Sather, AIA, and Jon Bernhard, AIA, designs buildings inspired by the master of American architecture but not shackled by him.

We mark the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Frank Lloyd Wright this year (1867−1959) for many reasons. He affirmed a truly American architecture, celebrating the unique topographies of our landscape, from the early Prairie Style, exemplified by the Robie House (1907) in Chicago, Illinois, through the later work in the Southwest such as Taliesin West (1937) in Scottsdale. He was innovative, too, such as building Fallingwater (1935) in western Pennsylvania for the Edgar J. Kaufmann family on a waterfall or designing the Guggenheim Museum (1959) in Manhattan as a spiral of galleries rather than in angular array. America’s greatest architect can also be lauded for pioneering ideas that helped promote today’s sustainable thinking, even though he would not have thought himself an environmentalist intent on world-saving. He was rather an architect intent on affirming the relationship between the built and natural environments –– a green thought for sure.

The 36,900-sq-ft LEED Platinum-targeted Health Services Building at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., is light-suffused, sustainable, inviting — a contextually sited destination for students seeking medical treatment and guidance in a garden/spa environment conducive to healing and good health practices. The new building adds approximately 20,000 square feet of clinical space on the south and incorporates the renovated two-story 1968 structure on the north while adding a grass sward. This area is the historical heart of campus, so the HSB is incorporated with three century-old structures, all on the National Register of Historic Places: Old Main, the University Club and the Piper Writer’s House.

In the 1950s, Frank Lloyd Wright designed what would have been the most spectacular state capitol building in the country — set amidst the landmark Papago Buttes in Phoenix. As with so many of the architect's before-their-time designs, that building was never built. More than a half century later, a savvy Phoenix-based developer placed one of the many spires intended for that project as an intersection focal point for his shopping complex in Scottsdale. Wright or Wrong? Inspiring, or not?

Since 1995, Taliesin West, Wright’s winter home and architectural laboratory in Scottsdale, now a National Historic Landmark, offers Youth Summer camps for children to find their way as architects, designers or whatever path they may eventually take, perhaps even a road not taken. The courses range from basic design to visioning the future. Wright, of course, was always looking forward and in different directions, inspired by technology and innovation throughout his life. After visiting Arizona in 1927 to consult on designs for the Arizona Biltmore, he returned seven years later with his students to escape the Wisconsin winter at the original Taliesin and to work on his concepts for the visionary Broadacre City model, which debuted at Rockefeller Center in 1935. A half century later, in 1991, the American Institute of Architects named Frank Lloyd Wright the country's greatest architect.

Chicago's Vernon Swaback, FAIA, with John E. Sather, AIA, AICP, and Jon C. Bernhard, AIA, comprise Swaback Partners, one of the Southwest’s most respected architectural firms. At 17, Swaback became Frank Lloyd Wright’s youngest apprentice, after interviewing with him at Taliesin in Wisconsin. America’s greatest architect invited Swaback to Taliesin West, then in the inspiring undeveloped desert near Scottsdale. In those years since, Swaback and his distinguished colleagues have had designs on excellence –– in homes, community planning and visioning. Here are just three.

The recently completed $200 million LEED-certified Spaceport America is located along the El Camino Real in a region of New Mexico called "Jornada Del Muerto" (Journey of the Dead) by the conquistadors almost five centuries ago. Today, this remarkable campus is the site of another kind of exploration as the world’s first inland purpose-built commercial spaceport capable of accommodating vertical- and horizontal-launch space vehicles. Buckle up, and remember to pack your Jules Verne and Tom Swift books and Star Wars and Star Trek movies.

What is now the Chase Bank on the southeast corner of 44th Street and Camelback Road in Phoenix has been the gateway to the exclusive Arcadia neighborhood since 1967. Many residents and architectural cognoscenti locally and nationally believe it is one of the city’s significant structures, particularly as it was designed by Frank Henry, a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired architect. But, a developer’s plan would have added a four-story, mixed-use condo project behind the bank. Raising the new building would raze the lifestyle and spirit of the historic citrus-growing area, project opponents argued. But, there’s the persistent argument about progress, too. The Great Recession helped kill the proposal. Here’s one account of that bank story.

The seeds of contemporary Phoenix-area architecture were post-Civil War adobe and newfangled wood houses. Today, many styles are represented throughout the country's fifth most populous city: Territorial, Spanish Mission, International, Mid-Modern. The influence of Frank Lloyd Wright is pervasive: Taliesin West, ASU Gammage, the Arizona Biltmore (he consulted) and many homes. But, the work of Al Beadle in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s is celebrated here as are others' designs of that time and today: Ralph Haver, Kemper and Michael Goodwin, Ned Sawyer, Bennie Gonzales, Will Bruder, Wright apprentice Vern Swaback and Paolo Soleri. The tour bus leaves inside.

Two Southwest sports stadiums under way share a need for intensive community outreach and careful coordination among the design and construction teams to deliver the much-needed facilities. The $35.9-million Albuquerque Public Schools Community Athletic Facility will include a 7,000-seat artificial-turf football arena, four concession buildings with restrooms, an enclosed press box with film deck, a field house with team rooms, conference and officials’ areas and maintenance storage. And, the University of Arizona is upgrading the north end zone for its Lowell-Stevens Football Facility. The project will add premium seating and fan amenities, relocate and provide new facilities for the football program, and install new concourses, cross-connecting access to the east and west stadium seating section and field lighting, scoreboard and disability updates.

A booming Phoenix metroplex invested deeply in its banking buildings following World II. As people migrated to the Southwest, local branches profitably served the new neighborhoods and the decentralized urban pattern of the West they represented. But, many of these structures have been lost, such as the Ed Varney-designed First Federal Savings branch in Phoenix and the geodesic-dome Valley National Bank in Tempe, designed by the very influential Weaver & Drover, now DWL. And, preservationists recently worried that another former Valley National Bank (now a Chase branch), often mistakenly ascribed to Frank Lloyd Wright, might have been threatened in the historic Arcadia community. Check out this continuing progress versus preservation story.