ar+d

Highly commended

Rick Joy

Rubio Avenue Studio

Tucson, Arizona

December 2000

Re-working and re-evaluating traditional building techniques are not usually associated with contemporary architecture in the United States. The jury did not commend this studio building only because it draws from traditions of building in Arizona, but because it also clearly commands control of space and light and materiality in a way appropriate for its latitude and climate. Here is a Mediterranean type moved to south-west North America, with an impassive exterior and the whole life of the affair turned inward.
It is a relatively simple structure of rammed earth (but three kinds of local earth were chosen to make a coloured pattern of layers). They emerged from the standardized shuttering normally used in concrete construction like a sort of rich cake, carved into by a thin courtyard into which the glass wall of the long studio calmly looks over a pool. It is an amazing focus of calm in the desolation of the American strip.

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