phoenix arts district master plan

A school is foremost a community. Individuals sharing a common curiosity or wonder, gather to learn, exchange ideas, and challenge one another. But communities form around place. That place becomes the frame for their interactions and shared experiences. In the best examples, buildings make places that encourage exchange, meeting, even serendipitous collisions.

The Liberty/Market site, despite its impressive masonry structures, vaults, and trusses, inherently resists a clear sense of union. Composed of various levels, construction languages, and building types; sliced in two by an intervening easement; buildings and spaces are decoupled from one another, an echo of an industrial past that cherished privacy and intellectual property.

Any design proposal in such a context risks further segmenting students, teachers, adjuncts, visiting artists, and the curious general public.

This design proposes a place-making strategy that stitches the project’s disparate parts together, not through further construction as though grafting on yet another language; but through a deconstructive language. By removing portions of the existing structures strategically, a delicate intervention can coalesce community while honoring, even exalting, the structures of our historic past.