OUR UNIQUE VISUAL WEALTH

OUR UNIQUE VISUAL WEALTH

Edward B. ‘Ned’ Sawyer, Jr.

A Desert Architecture

DAVID M. BROWN

Corbus Residence

“Edward B. ‘Ned’ Sawyer, Jr, AIA, is a “flat roof, walls of glass and lots of open space kind of guy,” says Fred Corbus, a long-time client of the architect. “I like doing a building that is site specific,” Sawyer has said, echoing a principle of his mentor, modernist Al Beadle. And, offering one of his own, “It’s not just about function; a successful structure has to also delight and excite.”

An architect in the Valley of the Sun for 50 years, Sawyer has designed about 250 commercial buildings and homes that excite and delight in Arizona, California, Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon, New Mexico and Texas. These designs include the award-winning Corbus home, floating amidst the granite boulders of north Scottsdale near Pinnacle Peak and Troon North (1977) and his masterpiece commercial building, The Pavilion, on Biltmore Circle (1980) in Phoenix.

His work has appeared in Architecture, CityAZ, Sunset, House Beautiful, and Phoenix Home and Garden magazines and The Kitchen Book, National Geographic Books – The Beautiful Southwest and A Guide to the Architecture of Metro Phoenix by the AIA Central Arizona Chapter.

Sawyer programs, designs, prepares construction drawings and inspects the construction of each project, explains Douglas B. Sydnor, FAIA, principal at Scottsdale-based Douglas Sydnor Architect and Associates Inc. and author of three architectural books. “Ned has a reputation of developing creative designs for projects with unique programs and conservative budgets. Beyond architectural design, Sawyer often guides the interiors with custom-designed furniture, accessories, company logo graphics and the art selection. Creating with this approach is more holistic and provides a visual continuity,” Sydnor explains. In addition, he designs mailboxes and entry doors, logos and other artworks for residential and commercial clients.

Throughout his career, he has affirmed a passion for the Mid-Century Modern style –– “an appreciation for simplicity, a desert architecture, instead of the fads,” Sawyer has said. A number of years ago, he told Sydnor that his goal for every project include natural and neighborhood contextualism: making sure the building fits, wherever it is, whatever it is. “I establish an aesthetic using washes, rocks and hillsides,” he has said of his home projects. “With residential clients, I have them discover such aspects during and after construction.”

Scott Jarson is a long-time admirer of Sawyer and his work. With wife Debbie, he is co-principal of azarchitecture/ Jarson & Jarson Real Estate, a 30-year-old firm dedicated to selling and celebrating Arizona homes designed by noted 20th-century and contemporary Arizona architects. “Ned Sawyer is a keystone in the foundation of Arizona Modernism. His talent is complete, reflective of a dedication to craft that is so often overlooked today.”

The Fourth-Dimensional Art

A Boston native, Sawyer moved to the Valley as a child and attended Madison Elementary and Central High in Phoenix. He grew up around architects and architecture.

In winter 1961, he began working in Phoenix as a designer/draftsman for Mid-Century Modern exemplar, Alfred Newman Beadle, AIA, where he learned about the proportions and crafted detailing of the International style as well as desert-sensitive siting. Sawyer told Sydnor that he also learned from Beadle that architecture “should be dynamic and respond to the harshness of the sun.”

When he started at ASU for the fall semester of 1961, Sawyer began to appreciate that architecture is an art experienced in the fourth dimension. “Painting is two-

dimensional, sculpture is three-dimensional, but architecture is also experienced as two and three-dimensional and then through ‘time,’ the fourth dimension,” he says. “This concept has formed my professional architectural philosophy and experience.”

He entered its School of Architecture, guided by the founding dean, James W. Elmore (1917–2007); this class was responsible for envisioning the Rio Salado project, which has revitalized Tempe’s riparian area at the Salt River. After graduating, Sawyer continued to work for Beadle until 1972. He has since led his practice as well as served as an architectural consultant for other firms. He and his wife Beverly have two sons and two granddaughters.

His civic involvement includes AIA Central Arizona Chapter president; ASU Design Review Board member; chairman, Scottsdale Development Review and Planning Commission; and member of Phoenix Camelback Rotary International Board and ASU Alumni Association Board. Sawyer has The Pavilion Office Complex

Murphy Residence, Paradise Valley

also served on design awards juries in Arizona, Colorado and California and has been an ASU design instructor and Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Apprentice Mentor.

He has received numerous awards including the Arizona Architects Medal from the AIA in 1979 and the Distinguished Achievement Award from Arizona State University two years later. In addition, he has lectured at AIA chapters, universities and special events and at the College of Architecture at ASU. In 2018, he received an ICON Award.

“Many know of his association and close friendship with Al Beadle, but for me, Ned’s own work is singular and very special. It is so particular to our place, it’s hard for me to think of a time that I was not aware of, or frankly inside of, one of Ned’s many wonderful designs,” Jarson says. “From his fully integrated homes to all the celebrated commercial builds, Ned Sawyer’s work is also reflective of a very serious record of a special time of design growth in our Valley.”

Commercial Excellence

Sawyer’s wide-ranging expertise includes educational, banking, healthcare buildings and other commercial structures as well as apartment complexes. Among these are Goodmans office warehouses and showrooms in Phoenix, Albuquerque and Tucson; several Western Savings branches in Phoenix and Tucson; and the masterplan for the American Heath & Convention Center in Sazolabata, Hungary.

The two-story Redirect Health center in Glendale combines “confident masses and planar elements with recessed niches and glazing,” he explains. Walls are eight-inch courses of exposed concrete masonry units, with “playful portholes” to view the space beyond. Black framing and smaller aluminum inset frames articulate the glazing, and horizontal metal canopies provide solar protection. “The building reflects the owner’s vision of a transparent medical practice by using open planning and glass walls where possible,” Sawyer says, noting that the glass-walled exit stairs and elevator shaft are lit during the evening hours.

Sawyer’s commercial masterpiece is The Pavilion Office Complex, Phoenix, 2525 E. Arizona Biltmore Circle in Phoenix, still resonant with innovation 40 years after its debut. The four-level 58,224-square-foot gardenstyle office development, grouped as four buildings, was completed in 1980 by owner Phil Davis, who contracted J.R. Porter Construction.

“With the site adjacent to the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, the developer sought the creation of a building which would reflect its context in a sympathetic manner, so the exterior and interior utilized exposed gray concrete masonry units,” Sawyer says. “Black steelwork was used for its stairs, bridges, handrails and shade devices in keeping with the hotel detailing.” A walkway over the parking area neatly transitions to a parking structure built later for the hotel. Mature trees and bermed desert landscaping add to the serenity and warmth of the campus.

A stream begins inside the covered courtyard at the second level and trickles down to a fountain on the main level, providing an evaporative cooling effect and auditory calming. Workers and their guests climb up through the levels and can chat or rest on benches, and punches through the walls offer light and views, including to the Wrigley Mansion to the south.

“The building massing was layered to form semi-private courts and a central atrium shielded from the severe sun and enhanced by fountains and landscaping,” Sawyer says. “This area serves as an oasis and common identity feature for each tenant while providing access to all parts of its complex. The atrium culminates into a grand central stair which extends upward to an observation platform allowing tenants and visitors full view.”

“Ned plays with and explores massing in a method that is highly interesting,” Jarson explains. “The use of positive and negative space in his designs, which to some at first glance may appear casual, are, in fact, highly complex and thoughtful; these negative spaces often become sun respites that control light, shade and shadow. He always explores solar exposure more than most of his modernist contemporaries. These are designs for Arizona. I’ve never seen Ned design in a piece of glass that sits hard against the sun. He’s masterful.”

Sawyer says: “The occupants are intended to serve as kinetic sculpture as they move through each level change and framed vista, providing life and special activity to the architectural experience. Al [Beadle] loved it. He would come here and relax.”

Homes at Home in the Desert

Jarson admires Sawyer’s commercial and residential work but says, “His residences are really something special and often overlooked in my opinion. Perhaps because he has a large portfolio of built work, many of which include some real design-world ‘movers and shakers’ clients, we fail to celebrate them as much as they deserve. I think our community has to some extent taken Ned for granted.”

His work includes the Goldman (1976) and Funk (1978) homes in Phoenix, both awarded by AIA; Murphy (1974) astride the Phoenix Mountain Preserve; and the recent Leite high-country getaway in Prescott (2017).

He has designed four homes for Murray and Dottie Goodman, one in Phoenix, two in Clearwater Hills, a foothills county island adjacent to Paradise Valley, and another in Flagstaff in 2000. In the ’70s, Sawyer and Beadle called the family’s office furniture company in Phoenix to furnish a bank project with Herman Miller and Knoll furniture. This led to a complete Contemporary remodel of the family’s 1950s central Phoenix home in 1980. “Ned had just completed an award-winning office building in the Biltmore area [The Pavilion] and incorporated some of the elements of that design into our home,” recalls Murray.

After designing the first Clearwater Hills home for the couple in the early 1980s, Sawyer followed with today’s home, completed in 2016. The 5,500-square-foot fivebedroom is built against a hillside, spans and overlooks a wash, which robustly rushes during the summer monsoons and winter rains. Sawyer even provided water chains from the roof to intensify that effect.

Materials and details are magically mixed: masonry, glass and obscure block, clerestory windows for sun and shadows, a white oak floor, LED lighting, a Japanese-style garden and a custom front door.

This is “total design” in which Sawyer masterfully integrates space, form, surface and detail. “It is both intriguing and seamless,” Jarson says. “His homes that incorporate this thought remain classically stunning. Simple in a Scandinavian way, but more generous and frankly . . . American in lifestyle.”

Says Goodman, “Ned approaches each project as a work of art. He really takes to heart Charles Eames’s famous quote that goes something like “The details are not just the details . . . They’re the whole thing.”

Sawyer’s residential masterpiece is an unassuming but spectacular home built into the granite boulders of north Scottsdale: The Corbus Home. The AIA Central Arizona Chapter has also awarded it for excellence.

Completed for the Corbus family on a five-acre desert parcel with large granite boulders, the small 1,300-square-foot home was designed for future expansion, which the Corbuses have done with Sawyer’s suggestions and guidance. “The couple loved the desert, its character and seasonal changes, so they felt the need to be ‘available to the environment,’ but required sun protection,” Sydnor explains.

Left: Funk Residence II above: Funk Residence Lein Residence

“My wife and I couldn’t really express what we wanted in the form of a house design, and we didn’t know any architects,” Fred recalls. “So we decided to drive around Phoenix to spot homes that looked like what we wanted. This moved us into saying we wanted ‘flat roofs, walls of glass and lots of open space.’”

A mutual friend introduced them, and Sawyer has since designed three homes for Corbus.

The intention was to float the home above the desert ravine, thereby using the “mega-boulders to form and define varied living experiences,” Sawyer says, noting that the plans were the first he signed as an architect for county approval. The result is a dramatic boardwalk approach to the front door; at night, lights from below illuminate the boulders and provide wayfinding.

“In order to expand these experiences, decks were located off of each area. With the exceptions of the bath and a portion of the kitchen, all other areas remain open, with the glass walls acting only as a weather seal,” Corbus says.

The original home, before air-conditioning was added, included adjustable shade screens to control the sun from overhead and vertical louvers to shield against the sun, deflect breezes into the home and provide privacy, Sydnor explains. “Such strategies have yielded a comfortable, energy-efficient space. Space heating and hot water are supplied by tracking-type solar collectors. The structure comprises steel columns, glue-laminated wood beams and infill panels of wood frame and cement plaster finish.”

The couple love the home. “Ned’s deep seated understanding of the desert, our personal desires, the use of open space and the lasting beauty of simple, straight-forward uncomplicated design have always given us such a sense of satisfaction,” Corbus says.

“His designs are remarkable, timeless and reflect a special brand of Arizona Modern that is truly a benchmark of design,” Jarson says. “The capper, of course, is that you won’t find anyone more, generous, thoughtful, humble and gracious. Ned is a man without equal. All of us are fortunate recipients of his abundant talent.”

David M. Brown is a Valley-based freelancer (azwriter.com). This is the fifth in an ongoing series celebrating Arizona’s “Visual Wealth.”