One such structure, created in 1971 by Bernard Friedman and John Whitmire of Friedman and Jobusch Architects, stands sentry at a corner of Broadway and Country Club Road. Soaring organic shapes vault sculpturally from the sere landscape like the ramparts of a cathedral consecrated to some wacko progressive religion. Blank fieldstone walls form the facades of cool interior caves. Here, on the two-mile Sunshine Mile - linking what was once the city’s suburban eastern reaches to its historic downtown - desert Modernists evolved a quirky utilitarian vernacular all their own.Ĭantilevered roofs canopy glass curtain walls, shading them from the harsh summer sun. The specific focus of “Broadway: Born Modern” is a checkerboard assortment of midcentury holdouts still standing lonely but proud amid the big-box stores and stucco strip malls on a stretch of Broadway from Euclid Avenue to Country Club Road. Arnold’s “Gateway Saguaro” on the Miracle Mile being perhaps the most emblematic example).
ADOBE BRIDGE CLUB TUCSON SERIES
To guide me I used a slick, informative foldout called “Broadway: Born Modern,” which is one in a series of fine guides the preservationist group has produced to find Tucson’s varied wonders, from its bars and drive-ins to its houses of worship, and also the city’s abundant neon signage (Dirk J. Some preservationists claim Tucson possesses some of the densest concentrations of midcentury Modernist architecture in the Southwest, reluctantly conceding that the finest examples are not nearly as easy to find as similar ones clustered throughout entire midcentury neighborhoods in Phoenix, just two hours away. While builders on the Eastern Seaboard assembled cookie-cutter colonials by the thousands, Tucson developers instead adapted the austerities of International Style Modernism to their city’s magnificent though challenging terrain. While it’s not surprising that housing starts flourished along with a rapidly growing city, what strikes a visitor now is how little the accompanying boom owed to structural archetypes then dominating postwar development back East.
Figures compiled by the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation peg Tucson’s 1940 population at 35,000, a figure that by 1960 had soared to 212,000. I recall, too, the pleasures of ordering a heaping platter of huevos rancheros at my favorite hipster brunch spot, the Five Points Market, situated on an intersection whose other notable landmarks include a florist selling $1 roses and a used-car dealership with the motto “Ugly but Honest.”īy the time Clyde Wanslee came up with that memorable slogan in the 1930s, the old pioneer town of Tucson had already entered a period of unprecedented expansion. I think about a photo gallery I like as much for its location near a funky tattoo parlor as for its adventurous exhibitions, a diner in a movie-ready structure unaltered since the 1960s, and the thrift shops of which Tucson boasts more than it has hipster brunch spots. I reflect on how deeply I enjoy the ramshackle dispersion of the city and on the fact that I now know which Mexican handicrafts store to visit if I am ever in need of a six-foot ceramic pineapple from Michoacán. That is, if anyone were bothering to look. And one of the city’s better-kept secrets is how often these places occupy structures that could easily be counted among the more significant examples of mid-20th century architecture in the country. It is also a city whose loopy retail landscape skews heavily toward yoga studios, thrift shops and vape stores. It is a blue dot in a red state, a college town whose seasonal population of students and retirees departs this month in a mass migration that leaves tumbleweed vacancies in its wake. It is a mini-metropolis whose proximity to the Mexican border has resulted not only in a shadow economy but also some fairly stark racial and economic bifurcations.
It is a grid city of long avenues and abundant strip malls a place whose largest employers are a university, the military, the government and a maker of missile systems.
It is a dusty outpost on the fringes of the Sonoran Desert, a cyclical boomtown that suffered badly in the financial crash of 2008 and that, even beforehand, had in many ways seen better days. I am, assuredly, mindful of those - aware that Tucson is well situated in a valley basin geologically lofted to an altitude (2,600 feet) that in my mind qualifies it as high desert that its signal feature is a series of jagged mountain ranges enclosing its flanks like a palisade that its extravagant skies, particularly at twilight, have a way of vaulting the spirits in a manner I have seldom experienced anyplace else besides Rome.
Escape is what led me to Tucson, a fact unlikely to bring joy to the hearts of its civic boosters, who would perhaps prefer visitors to focus on the positive aspects of this midsize Southwestern city.
0 kommentar(er)
