Modern Phoenix Dot Net

for JAVA Magazine

"We all have to do it for ourselves, that's the message," says Alison King who, along with Husband Matthew, run Modern Phoenix, a web presence devoted to the preservation of Modernist residences in the Valley. Perhaps so, but in terms of understanding the mid-century architecture that surrounds us, the Kings alone have given the rest of us an enormous head start.

What began as a visual scrapbook for the two design fans, has grown in less than a decade to be THE source for information on the subject; as well as a virtual meeting place for fellow enthusiasts and homeowners.

Between March 28 and April 11 this year, that virtual meeting place becomes actual, as Modern Phoenix holds its sixth annual Modern Phoenix Home Tour and Expo. For details on this, go to ModernPhoenixWeek.com. The subject of the tour this year is the Paradise Gardens community of Central Phoenix, a 1960's era neighborhood designed in conjunction with famed Modernist architect Al Beadle.

Growing up in a Modernist-designed Scottsdale neighborhood, Alison didn't always see the charm in her surroundings. "When you grow up with it, it just seems normal and you don't appreciate it," she says. It wasn't until she lived in New York, where most of the housing was of pre-war design influence, that she came to see Valley architecture differently. "It was just just so different there, with all the brownstones…," she says.

"When my husband and I went to Parson's School of Design [in NYC] we took classes in architectural design and started going to the Guggenheim and the Met and I was coming to understand the vocabulary and detail of it...so when we would come back here for holidays I started to appreciate it more and more."

"When we decided to give living in Phoenix a shot, we had to decide between [traditionally] historic bungalow, Willow-district homes, which people were really fixing up, and more modernist homes, which were really actually in decline."

The Kings bought a "cracker box" current home in North Phoenix and began searching the Valley for someplace more suitable. That search formed the foundation of Modern Phoenix.

Alison would use her spare time to drive around Phoenix and take pictures of homes she thought might be possibilities or which generally suited the couple's aesthetic sensibilities. "This was before Flickr, before Facebook...but I could build my own page with my pictures and give my husband the URL so that he could look at them," she explains. "...but once you start naming things [on the internet] people start finding them."

Soon, Alison and Matthew began to get lots of correspondence from people interested in individual architects, or Modernist dwellings in general. "People would write me from Texas or someplace and say 'I'm coming to Phoenix and I have no idea where to look.'"

Alison didn't intend to be the go-to guru for all questions regarding local Modernist architecture. "It started to be a serious time commitment, for one thing," she says. "That's why I started the forum; so people could get in touch with one another and share their own information."

Ultimately, though, another unforeseen time commitment arose. "Within months of putting up the message boards and getting people to talk to each other consistently making these sort of virtual friendships and this network...it became obvious to us that we really needed to do a home tour." Modern Phoenix was taking shape.

"It started off as a group of like-minded friends who wanted to get together and talk about somebody's house or bathroom or whatever…" The first event was in 2005. "We just said, 'let's be Arizonans and walk around.'" Sounds care-free, doesn't it? Not so fast. "The minute it was over, people kept asking me 'when is the next one?'"

And so a new annual Valley event was born, the Modern Phoenix Home Tour and Expo.

Aside from the very first event, organizing the homes to be toured was more difficult that Alison first imagined. Not only did many people not know what they had in terms of the significance of their own houses, but putting that forward as the basis for a community activity was something Alison sometimes had to work at. "That's the hardest thing...it's not like it was in the '70's when I was growing up - sometimes these neighbors don't even know each other…"

It's getting easier as the event matures, Alison explains. "I still do a lot of the recruiting by word of mouth or door-to-door or phone calls." Thanks in large part to the King's efforts, awareness has been raised about mid-century architecture in general and the Modern Phoenix site and tour in particular. "They've heard of us now," she says.

In fact, the event has become successful enough to pay for itself. "We charge a fee for the tour...but this is the first year that we're able to offer most of our educational events for free," she says. In addition to the actual tour, other items on the roster include seminars, discussions and slideshows by architects, designers and historians.

Anyone curious about researching their own home (or their future one) will find resources and guidance at this year's event as well.

Besides having become a second career, Modern Phoenix has benefitted the Kings in a particularly tangible way. It was through a connection made on the website's message board that the Kings found their own current home, just outside Phoenix's central corridor. A participant with whom Alison had once corresponded got back in touch, wondering if the Kings had any interest in a home that was about to go on-market. "If we'd just gone with a traditional realtor, I doubt if we ever would have found anything like this."

In fact, the home they found was close to the very heart of mid-century, Modernist design. "Our house was designed by Ralph Haver, who first built the house next door as his own residence, and then this one." From it's "spider legs" exterior columns and beams, to it's low-slope roof, the house is a classic example of modernism for the masses.

Though small by today's standard, the main impression one gets is of spaciousness. De rigueur design elements from recent decades, such as framed-in alcoves, artificial columns, rounded corners, and elaborate window coverings are absent in a modernist home. In Alison's, house, clean lines are the order - lines that seem to go toward infinity, as they begin at the front door and cary through to the furthest reaches of the patio (shown here.) The far wall of the living room is a picture window; essentially making it a landscaped view of the world beyond. Her breakfast table nestles at the joint of two more broad expanses of glass (shown below.)

Form follows function here. Designed for life where temperatures can exceed 110 degrees, the living spaces are quick to heat and quick to cool, as there is no additional airspace given to vaulted ceilings. While entire walls of glass feature prominently in some parts of the house, sides facing full sun (such as the traditional front of the house) have none.

Other intrinsic advantages? "These things are built like tanks," says Alison. She says an independent home inspection on her Haver house turned up a small fraction of the problems that previous, contemporary, home had - even though the Haver home had a good 50 years on the other.

At this point, Alison believes she has a good handle on what once was and what now remains of the mid-1900's Modernist dwellings in the Valley. Her main source of initial research has been at the Phoenix Public Library's Arizona Room. Developers used to announce their plans for new subdivisions in learned journals and trade-to-consumer publications, many of which are are stored there. These aren't available online and can't be loaned out; so Alison has multiple three-ring binders straining to hold page after page of old articles and advertisements that she's photographed at the library, and brought back to "Modern Phoenix Central" to follow up on with a personal visit.

"1953 to 1964 was the heyday of Modernist home building in the Valley," says Alison. "Around the mid-sixties is where single family homes gave way to multi-family homes." "Also, at one point there was apparently a mason's strike, and all these homes that were built out of block or brick [like virtually all of the Modernist ones] were in crisis...that's a unique regional thing that influenced what was being built at the time."

Being old and of limited supply in the Valley housing market at one time meant the likelihood of protection and even assistance when it came to preservation. Neighborhoods with early 20^th century housing, such as the Willow and Encanto areas are designated as historic and owners are kept from making alterations that run too far afield of the property's original design.

Mid-century homes, on the other hand, didn't have time to reach the same type of popular appeal before a critical change took place. In 2006, Arizona Proposition 207 was passed which, among other things, put the price of historic designation so high as to make it nearly impossible to achieve, says Alison. "The city has played its role maintaining the historic neighborhoods that were already designated prior to Prop 207, but now [a neighborhood would] have to hire a private consultant for thousands of dollars before you'd even have a chance."

And so the importance of Modern Phoenix grows even further. In the place of neighborhood associations and historic designation, it hopes to raise the value of mid-20^th century architecture in the Valley by raising the awareness of it. "As owners of Modernist homes, we're on our own," says Alison. "A lot of homes have been lost just out of neglect and because people really didn't know what they had. A huge part of the fight for preservation is education."