PROfiles

>>> meet the designers behind projects featured in this issue

John Douglas, FAIA

“Bennie Gonzales was a friend, in a professional sense,” says Scottsdale, Arizona architect John Douglas, of the late architect who did the original design for the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. “I was around when the center first opened in 1975. The center was even used as a building example in my architectural registration exam.” But knowing Gonzales and the center didn’t win Douglas the commission to do its $11 million renovation, featured in this issue. The project went to Douglas because he has built his practice, Douglas Architecture and Planning, not only by specializing in new designs, but also by doing sensitive renovations and additions to historic and culturally significant Arizona locales, such as the Desert Botanical Garden, the Heard Museum (also a Gonzales design) and Old Main, the first building on the Arizona State University campus, circa 1898. Douglas’ attention to period details, be they from the 1890s or the 1970s, has won him accolades, including some 85 design awards. “The center is Bennie Gonzales’ most famous building,” says Douglas. “I wanted to honor that.”

Jeremy A. Jones, AIA, LEED AP

That architect Jeremy Jones was on the creative team which designed the new Appaloosa Branch Library in Scottsdale, Arizona should be no wonder, given his background. Jones, vice president of DWL Architects Planners, Inc. in Phoenix, has worked on 13 libraries before Appaloosa, which is a collaboration between DWL and Douglas Sydnor Architect and Associates, Inc. Jones has also spent much of his career, both in Colorado and in Arizona, working on education projects. Additionally, his environmental background helped steer the library’s design into LEED Gold certification levels. “My Dad was a weatherman,” quips the Washington native. “I had no choice but to understand the environment.” Jones has been designing climate-friendly buildings for decades, including earth-sheltered homes when he had his own practice, and has authored two books on the subject, published by Chronicle Books. An additional asset that makes library design a favorite for Jones? “My wife is a librarian. Libraries are part of our lives.” The new branch library is this issue’s “Project Walk-Through.”

Douglas Sydnor, AIA

“I’m a generalist,” says architect Douglas Sydnor of his Scottsdale-based practice, Douglas Sydnor Architect and Associates, Inc., which he founded in 1993. “We’ll do residential, commercial and public projects.” Even though he helms a small firm, big projects don’t intimidate him. For those, he partners with a large firm, which is what he did for the new Appaloosa Branch Library featured in this issue, done in collaboration with DWL Architects Planners Inc. Sydnor, who received his undergraduate in architecture at Arizona State University and his master’s from Harvard, got his start on a large project, helping his father, the late architect Reginald Sydnor, work on a “500,000-square-foot mega-remodel” for St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. “It was my first project. I learned a lot quickly.” Since then, his work, which has a decidedly Modernist leaning, has garnered him numerous design awards, and his civic and architectural activities led to his 2007 induction in the Scottsdale History Hall of Fame. In his spare time? Sydnor’s book, Images of America: Scottsdale Architecture (Arcadia Publishing, 2010) comes out in February.