The West's Best: AIA Western Mountain Region Design Awards

BY DEBORAH PADDISON

Maybe it's the color of the light, or the feeling of limitless possibility inherent in our brilliant blue skies and wide-open spaces. Whatever it is, there's just something about the West that inspires architects to design some of the world's most innovative, forward-thinking projects. If there were ever any doubt, one need only consider the following winners of the 2006 AIA Western Mountain Region Design Competition.

These projects, which received Honor, Merit and Citation awards, were designed by AIA architects registered and licensed in the AIA Western Mountain Region, encompassing Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada and Wyoming. The projects, built or unbuilt, can be located anywhere in the world and reflect the highest standard of design in response to user requirements, site, context, climate and environment.

Honor Awards

Photograph: Bill Timmerman.

Situated in a neglected 1950s-era neighborhood in north-central Phoenix, this two-story design studio/residence is positioned on the upward slope of a lot adjacent to the Phoenix Mountains Preserve. For the primary building material, architect Matthew Trzebiatowski, AIA, chose exposed steel that will weather naturally and meld with the color of the surrounding hills.

The name "Xeros" (from the Greek for "dry") reflects the building's environmentally sensitive characteristics. A two-story, lower-level design studio descends down into the earth, with a single-story residence above. An opaque façade to the west shields the building from the intense afternoon sun, and the exposed faces to the south and east feature an external layer of woven-metal shade mesh. The long, narrow lot necessitated a tall building with a petite footprint that allows the maximum amount of site to be retained for low-water-use vegetation.

To access the residence, visitors ascend an exterior staircase to an upper-level balcony before entering the common room (sitting, dining and kitchen). A central gallery leads to the cantilevered master suite/media room. To complete the cycle of movement, a cantilevered "Romeo and Juliet" balcony allows city views to the south and across the long axis of the building. To capture the mountain-preserve views, the space is completely glazed on the north façade.

Photograph: Bill Timmerman.

Arizona State University Interdisciplinary Science & Technology Building III. Photograph: Bill Timmerman.

For this building, part of the ASU Polytechnic Campus in Mesa, Arizona, Jones Studio used unconventional laboratory-planning and organizational strategies to house four separate but similar research departments. The resulting design both inspires researchers and facilitates a healthy working and learning environment.

The "walled garden" concept was inspired by both traditional architectural forms in the Sonoran Desert that use mass and siting to protect against extreme temperatures, and the jardines entremuros of the desert around Mexico City. In this style, classified by its introverted posture to its surrounding context, high walls guard the perimeter while tranquil meditative gardens thrive within the structure. The gardens in the core of this building will divide the office and laboratory zones, provide opportunities for interaction between researchers as they circulate throughout the building, and allow a reconnection with the natural environment.

This high-profile research facility must provide the university with a return on its investment; the building will not only increase the overall research capacity of the university, but also will serve as a showpiece to draw faculty of national prominence. It is also the first project at ASU Polytechnic to involve the LEED process.

Arizona State University Interdisciplinary Science & Technology Building III. Photograph: Bill Timmerman.

Arizona State University Interdisciplinary Science & Technology Building II.

Located on ASU's main Tempe campus, this building is dedicated to engineering and physical sciences research. The goal for the design was to support and enhance the learning environment by creating the kind of spaces that attract students, and to provide areas for communication and collaboration outside of the lab environment, removing barriers to interaction.

Richard + Bauer used an open architecture that exposes the air handling and distribution, piping and data distribution, and common building services. A 280-foot-long, 60-foot-high shaded central courtyard is flanked by open, flexible loft lab spaces. Partitions between labs are temporary and can be located anywhere along the building's length, maximizing flexibility and adaptability for meeting space requirements. The central area provides gathering, conference and lounge spaces at each level to promote interaction within the interdisciplinary environment. Perforated Corten steel panels enclosing the courtyard provide a balance of natural daylight and filtered shade. Six large fans circulate large volumes of air, while misting systems provide evaporative cooling.

This project was noted for its "excellence in architecture with an industrial feel to it."

University of Arizona Meinel Optical Sciences Building. Photograph: Bill Timmerman.

The Meinel Optical Sciences Building is a 47,000-square-foot expansion and partial renovation for the Optical Sciences Department at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The building contains optical research labs, teaching labs, classrooms, interaction areas and research offices.

Richard + Bauer's design is an abstraction of camera obscura, or "dark room." Daylight enters the space through a series of apertures, each creating a specific optical effect. Three vertical light shafts penetrate the building and terminate in a series of two-story interaction spaces. Light-sensitive research functions are organized along the southern side of the building, with windowed offices open to natural light and views of the campus and mountains to the north. A two-story lower-level lobby space opens to the auditorium and houses exhibits related to optical research, while adjacent to the roof terrace is a large conference room and breakout space.

Recalling the color of the campus brick, the structure's cast-in-place concrete is sheathed in a copper alloy treated to a reddened bronze color. Thermally broken exterior panels shade the building from the harsh desert sun. The northern glass wall is an interpretation of a Fresnel lens, with simultaneous use of reflection and transparency recalling the rhythm and texture of the building's façade.

Merit Awards

Field House. Photograph: Bill Timmerman.

"Land, sky and seasons" were the guiding tenets for the design of this residence, located in Ellington, Wisconsin. The owner, whose ancestors hail from Lithuania, feels a kinship with the northern latitudes and wanted a home that was connected to the changing seasons and that reflected a sense of space, farmland and prairie. Wendell Burnette Architects designed a simple 5,000-square-foot box clad in a zinc galvanized metal skin. From a distance, the house recedes into its agrarian landscape sprinkled with constructed objects of utility, such as neighboring barns and silos, and only reveals its purpose up close. The site is understood as a garden; planted and fallow fields of corn, soybean, wheat and oats — along with the apple orchards that hide the occasional pumpkin patch — heighten the sensation of seasonal change. Whether it's intimate conversations by the warmth of fire, morning coffee in the sun, a gallery of "the art and books of a lifetime" or a silo ladder that ascends to a secret rooftop observatory, the house provides ample opportunity for reconnection to self and the land.

The Duke.

The Duke is a modern, pure building that cuts a clean, sharp edge through the randomly built industrial and older residential environment of its downtown Scottsdale surroundings. For Circle West Architects, the overriding concept for this multi-family residential space was the relationship between community and individuality. The building expresses individuality in that it is a singular building with eight individual homeowners, yet it promotes community through architectural transparency at the second floor. The building's form was designed around compressing various functions into individual, yet related spaces and allowing the character of each space to define the others. Sustainable design was a key principle, and Circle West Architects participated in Scottsdale's Residential Green Building Program for this project.

Palo Verde Library/Maryvale Community Center.

This project exercises the mind and body at the same time — literally. The Palo Verde Library and adjacent Community Center is an innovative complex built up around an existing public pool and park space in the Maryvale neighborhood of Phoenix. The project was able to maintain the park and secure a parking variance and an agreement with nearby schools to save a large ballfield and keep it as part of the complex.

The two buildings, library and gymnasium, are clear-span, column-free spaces, lit from top and bottom for balanced daylight. An eight-foot band of externally shaded glass reinforces the visual connection between the buildings and the community. This allows the activities within each program to be an integral part of the neighborhood, day and night, while keeping direct sun and heat gain from being a burden. In between the masonry forms on the ballfield side of the complex, a light seam of palo verde green stitches the pool and building programs together in a north-south circulation spine.

For proper library acoustics, the interior wrapper is detailed using recycled aspen OSB panels. Acoustic considerations throughout, including in the gym, allow many of the spaces to serve their primary function but also be used for performance recitals or public meetings. Outside, the park's southeast corner was preserved with its old-Phoenix landscape of Aleppo pines and grass, serving as a contemplative park for the library.

Citation Awards

Hotel Valley Ho. Photograph by Mark Boisclair.

In 1956, architect Edward L. Varney saw his Hotel Valley Ho take shape in downtown Scottsdale, Arizona. From Hollywood celebrities to business moguls, it was the place to see and be seen. Fast-forward 50 years — today the historic Valley Ho is still the place to see and be seen, only now in retro-contemporary fashion, thanks to a redesign and rejuvenation by Allen + Philp Architects of Scottsdale. The 14-acre resort, which was saved from the wrecking ball in 2002, is recognized as one of the most intact examples of a mid-century Modern motor hotel in the country.

The original buildings have been rebuilt, with rooms still featuring original masonry walls and floor-to-ceiling glass walls opening up to either a patio or balcony, now with dual-pane energy-saving glass. New contemporary touches include translucent bathroom walls and designer tubs. A signature design element of the original building was a series of decorative 350-pound precast concrete panels that hide handrails and act as a horizontal "belt." New panels were cast using molds made from the originals.

Allen + Philp designed a dramatic addition to the property: a seven-story tower containing a spa and fitness center and five levels of condominium residences, topped by a roof terrace. Although unbuilt, the tower was included in the original plans, and the existing foundations were engineered to accommodate it.

Sandia MINI Dealership. Photograph by Kirk Gittings.

Part of a complex that sells and repairs new and used BMWs, the Sandia, New Mexico MINI dealership features a distinctive design concept that sets it apart from other MINI dealerships across the country. In order to make the dealership more visible from the adjacent elevated freeway, the architect used a glass-dominated design for the showroom and created a mechanism that cantilevers a car from the second floor of the MINI dealership in a frameless glass box. The showroom's steel tube shapes and wide flange beams finished in a black epoxy paint create an unusual visual effect for passing motorists, particularly when the showroom is illuminated at night.

Stone Ridge Church. Photograph by Bill Timmerman.

Located on a 23-acre site overlooking Interstate 8 in Yuma, Arizona, Stone Ridge Church offers family-oriented worship on an inviting campus. The church was founded in 1945 as a Southern Baptist affiliate; in 1999, DeBartolo Architects of Phoenix worked with church leaders to conceive a long-range plan for the campus and assist in setting a contemporary vision and direction for future growth. A few years later, they were ready to implement their plan.

Completed in 2005, the new design for the church is simple yet profound, with a contemporary mix of exterior materials including corrugated Zincalume and ventilated cement board panels. Gabion walls filled with river rock serve as retaining walls to diminish blowing sand across the site; metal overhangs filter the hot Yuma sun. Inside, glass panels separate the open, airy spaces into functional areas such as worship space, an auditorium and classrooms designated for various age groups. Custom paneling made from 1-by-2-inch sanded and sealed cedar louvers adds a touch of modern warmth while primarily serving as acoustic enhancement.

Outdoors, the geometric courtyard space is an intimate yet grand public plaza that accommodates members before and after services and fosters community. Individual outdoor spots serve as locales for various church activities, and trees and grass surround an outdoor baptismal pool.

This unbuilt project, envisioned as a sophisticated underground complex in an abandoned missile silo, is one of 10 projects of similar nature that are being prepared for a book. Each project centers around a current cultural or political issue that is powerfully reflected in architecture. "The conversion of an abandoned Titan II missile silo into a new, remote UN Security Council chambers is emblematic of architecture's potential to symbolically charge and insert meaning into an inert, outdated facility through adaptive reuse," says the architect. "The proposal here is to symbolize that the lunacy of the Cold War and the lessons that were learned within this era can now serve as the foundation for an attempt to truly achieve a sense of applied reflection and informed honesty in diplomacy.

"Through its aggressive yet poetically made point that architecture can convey meaning and modify behavior, it acknowledges that communication is the ultimate tool that can achieve this state, and that it is only within this context that true understanding can exist," he continues. "As in epochs past, the architectural endeavor can again show its possibilities to create places that clarify and aspire to achieve even the loftiest of our ideals."

National Palace Museum South Branch.

Scheduled to be completed in 2010, the South Branch of the National Palace Museum in Taibo City, Taiwan will encompass 345,000 square feet of exhibit space promoting Asian arts and culture. The building will anchor a 75,000-hectare campus with a lake and park areas. The goal is to create "a world-class museum that will foster a new consciousness of the cultural connections between Taiwan and the rest of Asia and the world beyond," according to the Web site.

Using literal and symbolic concepts that reflect Asian iconography, reverence for nature and man's place between heaven and earth, architect Antoine Predock, AIA, designed a mythical exhibit experience presented as a cinematographic unfolding of space. His design centers on the imagery of a mountain as a symbol for the architecture. In the center, a faceted, jade-tinted glass and cypress structure — Jade Mountain — rises up, aiming toward the tallest peak in Taiwan, Yu Shan. Visitors walk a gentle slope from the plaza to the primary exhibit hall, and continue rising up the mountain to the futuristic and floating space of the new media gallery. The experience is meant to be an episodic journey through Asian space and time. A wireless digital overlay throughout the site and all galleries interweaves pan-Asian subtexts. At the top of Jade Mountain, visitors are afforded magnificent views over the museum, lake and Yu Shan beyond.

Predock envisions the museum as "an approachable, celebratory community center, a fluid, living scroll, that is woven and read, felt and lived, as it travels back in time, spiraling and unfolding toward contemporary Taiwan and the future."

U.S. Arid-Land Agricultural Center. Photograph by Bill Timmerman, courtesy of SmithGroup.

This facility in Maricopa, Arizona conducts research in pest management and biological controls, cotton physiology, genetics and plant-insect interaction, as well as irrigation and water quality. For this project, SmithGroup consolidated two existing facilities into a streamlined, energy-efficient research campus totaling 99,431 square feet.

The conceptual design parallels the diagram of the typical farm, with a variety of buildings and modules: an administrative building with a cafeteria and conference center; an office facility with scientist offices, interaction space and a computer lab; a laboratory facility including support space; as well as 12 greenhouses, a hydraulics lab, shops and a central plant. The buildings are essentially nicely detailed barns that are economical, modular and able to be reconfigured.

The project was designed to be as energy efficient as possible in its mechanical and electrical systems, and to embody the spirit of energy and water conservation. Glazing is used where appropriate throughout the structure to maximize daylighting into workspaces and to take advantage of panoramic views. (For more on the facility, see this issue's "Project Walk-Through.")