The Twenty-Five Year Award the AIA just bestowed on Phoenix’s Burton Barr Library is an acknowledgment not only of the abilities of Will Bruder, FAIA, and his collaborators, including DWL Architects & Planners, but also of an all-too-brief moment when American cities, especially fast-growing ones in the Southwest, deployed architecture to celebrate their coming of age. Architects like Bruder, who worked with progressive politicians such as Terry Goddard, the former mayor of Phoenix, and New Mexico’s Antoine Predock, FAIA, who designed several buildings that are long overdue for a Twenty-Five Year Award of their own, produced some of the most striking and important civic monuments of the end of the 20th century.
The Barr Library is a marvel to behold. It is the only building of its kind and scale in Phoenix: Other prominent landmarks, such as city hall, museums, and stadia, were designed with little sensitivity to use or context, or by design are recessive and modest. The additions Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects designed for the Phoenix Art Museum across the street from the library are a perfect example of that latter approach.
By contrast, the library responds to its setting with materials, forms, and colors that both stand apart from the surrounding dusty-colored neo-desert and also echo the confused urbanity of this edge of downtown. The library, clad on its two longest sides with perforated metal sheets that Bruder adapted from their original use—cladding agricultural silos—looks much larger than its six stories would indicate. Part of the reason for that is the lack of evident windows on the two longer sides, and the abstraction of the glass façades, partially shaded from the sun by sails, on the short faces. As you enter the building from the parking lot, the library sets itself off from the rest of the city in a manner common to such epicenters of car-centric sprawl. This is a monument that wants to signal its importance but also reflect the community it serves.
When you enter into the low reception area and make your way into what Bruder calls “the canyon,” that sense of civic import begins to give way to wonder. These spaces are rough and ready, revealing the minimal budget the architects had available to them (just $98 per square foot). Their strategic response was to go for big effect rather than refined detailing, making the most of the resulting concrete, steel, and other metal surfaces. As a result, from the moment you walk in the door you get the sense that you have entered into a knowledge machine, powered by the massive motors of book stacks and gears of elevators that are softened only by glass-enclosed meeting rooms and special collections.
The elevators and stairs are at the heart of the “canyon” and invite you to ascend up to the light that filters down from an unseen source and shimmers on the honed surfaces. Bruder’s metaphor is clear: The library is a human-made and machine-like version of a mesa, rising not in a desert landscape but in one of sprawl, whose crevasses you climb to reach a point from which you can command your surroundings.
It is indeed at the top of the canyon that the real revelation comes. There, almost an acre expanse of the more heavily used books spreads around you in a triple-height space. Inspired by Bruder and his fellow architects’ trip to Henri Labrouste’s libraries in Paris, this reading room is a hangar of learning, the stripped-down aesthetic only serving to highlight the sense of openness. Floating above the city and the stacks, here is an environment with no barriers, only free-standing columns that tie down the roof.
Those columns, along with the slot skylights, have made the reading room the site of an annual pilgrimage—one that Bruder does much to promote. On the summer solstice, residents gather to watch as the sun comes through clear circles in the slots and lights the sculpted steel tips of the columns. Any building that inspires such a ritual showcases the ability of architecture to stir the public imagination.
Clearly, the Burton Barr library works. It has become a heavily used and democratic institution, serving as the focus of not only knowledge delivery and sharing, but also of social services. It has also become a symbol of Phoenix, though an abstract one that does not lend itself to postcards or their modern equivalent, Instagram posts (the solstice celebration is the exception). It has also been joined by a host of other beautifully designed libraries, particularly in nearby Scottsdale, where the city government has commissioned work by good local firms such as Richärd+Bauer Architecture (now Richärd Kennedy Architects).
What is remarkable about the Barr Library is that, unlike some other past Twenty-Five Year Award winners, it does not look dated. The project’s cheap, industrial materials have held up well (though a violent storm of the kind common to the Sonoran Desert caused extensive damage to the reading room a few years back). Whether or not isolated and imposing blocks like the library, designed to awe us, are the best reflection of an open and participatory democracy is another question. Like all historical buildings, the Burton Barr Library reveals both the biases and preconceptions of its time. But, like all good historical structures, it also rises above those things to give us moments of beauty and connection to each other, and to a larger world, that justifies its grandeur.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
