Scarpa in the South-West - architectural design of the central library of Phoenix, AZ - includes floor plans and cross sections

Architectural Review, The, March, 1996 by Margaret Seal

Like Antoine Predock (AR February 1996 p64), Will Bruder has a talent for making buildings that work well when seen from motorways, as well as by people who approach them on foot. And, like Predock, he is not afraid of translating the great and mighty forms of the natural landscape of the American South-West into his buildings. His Phoenix central library (designed with DWL Architects) takes, he says, at least part of its inspiration from the mesas of Monument Valley. Though it is set in the middle of the city on Central Avenue, its shape does, close up, almost seem to rival those of the (much more pointy) mountains that can be seen all round on the fringe of the plain.

That the library has such presence is largely due to its bulk. Fundamentally, the building is a five-storey sealed box with very large floorplates (90 m x 60 m); it is big, but is saved from being a monolith by dextrous manipulation of the basic box and its surfaces. To east and west of the basically rectangular floor are thin service zones that have outer walls curved in plan and which project beyond the plane of the north wall to help shade its glass face; the walls of these zones are clad in copper sheets, both flat and corrugated. Bruder calls the resulting smooth brown curved forms that flank the body of the building `saddlebags'.

Yet the consciously atavistic terminology and choice of models, which project a kind of South-West, homely cheerfulness onto the building, cannot conceal an acute architectural intelligence at work. Bruder, who did not attend architecture school, became an architect in the old-fashioned way, almost by apprenticeship, as he worked for a succession of distinguished architects and befriended others including Paolo Soleri and Bruce Goff. Perhaps as a result, his sensibility is much more honed to appreciation of the tectonic qualities of architecture than many of his contemporary countrymen. Looking at his work, it comes as no surprise to learn that he became a devotee of Carlo Scarpa during a period as a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in 1987.

But unlike Scarpa, whose devotion to craftsmanship is legendary, Bruder has to work within the rigorous constraints of the (very efficient) industrialised US building industry - particularly in the Phoenix library, which is his biggest building to date, but one that has had to be realised on quite a restricted budget. Externally, the tectonic sensibility is to be seen in the copper walls of the saddlebags, which are perforated with regular holes so that at night the inner life of the building is seen in shadow-play. In daytime, it becomes clear that the saddlebags are slashed by smooth polished steel panels that rise from above the entrances to roof level. These curve slightly inwards over the entrance canopies, emphasising that they are metaphors for the girths, or whatever the straps are called that attach saddlebags to the horse. But the polished steel panels do more than merely call attention to the equestrian aspects of the design; in certain lights, they act as mirrors for the sky, so the brown cliffs suddenly seem to have been miraculously chopped through by a wide canyon.

The entrances themselves have canopies, or rather virtual canopies, made of white-painted universal steel beams which project horizontally f rom under the curve of the polished metal. Every fourth beam cantilevers far out, its neighbour is a couple of metres shorter, and there is a shorter beam between that and the next long beam. The canopy is a powerful (yet not overpowering) invitation to enter which delicately reaches out against the huge scale of the copper walls, gradually becoming visually more dense and protective as you penetrate towards the interior: Carlo Scarpa has come to the South-West.

But before going in, it is as well to finish looking at the exterior. On the south side, the building projects beyond the saddlebags and is revealed as a rather angular grey unequine entity, whose thin precastconcrete walls frame a glass skin which constantly changes, for it is striated with computer controlled adjustable aluminium louvres that move according to the sun to prevent the interior from becoming over-isolated. The north elevation is contained by the ends of the saddlebags that house escape stairs, the projections gradually peel back the copper to reveal the precast concrete of the inner walls - another Scarpa-like touch. The glass wall is not only shaded by the projecting saddlebags but by vertical sails (designed with FTL/Happold) of teflon-coated acrylic fabric. Their profiles are calculated to provide shading for the interior against direct sunlight between spring and autumn without obscuring magnificent views of the mountains above the predominantly low-rise city. The sails are kept in shape by ropes in sleeves at their outer edges@ the ropes are tensioned against struts that convey the sails' loads back to the main structure. It is surprising that Bruder has not come up with a homely South-Western metaphor for the frilly-Kicker effect of the sails against the glass.