UA architecture students reach for the sky with downtown building designs

UA undergrads build models of skyscrapers

Can you imagine a 40-story skyscraper towering over downtown Tucson?

That’s what 48 fourth-year architecture students at the University of Arizona have been doing this past semester with their imaginations in overdrive.

And that’s what several downtown leaders got to do earlier this month when they were among the judges reviewing the student’s 48 strikingly different models for a new skyscraper.

Tucson has nothing taller than 22 stories and nothing that high has been built since 1986.

“Whether this has any foundation in reality is a whole other matter,” said Robert Knight, executive director of the Tucson Museum of Art, which collaborated with the UA School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture on the class project.

Reality would entail winning over a neighborhood reluctant toward anything above two stories, changing city zoning at that property that limits the height to 100 feet, and actual demand and financing for such a project.

But downtown leaders saw merit in the student exercise. Developer Michael Keith specializes in one- and two-story designs that distinctly harken back to the 19th century, but he fully acknowledges that modern urban centers, including Tucson, need to become denser and “the only way to do that is to go up.”

“The dialogue is where is Tucson going to go from here?” Keith said. “Are we going to be a prisoner to the past? I think this will be an ongoing conversation.”

Local architect Paul Weiner was impressed with the students’ knowledge of multistory structures and their eagerness in employing wind research, sun angle calculations, energy efficient green architecture and photovoltaic panels.

“Those of us observing are just getting our minds around the magnitude of the program.” Weiner said. “Any time you inject intelligent input into a system that has atrophied or found complacency, it’s a good thing.”

The Tucson Museum of Art officials have loudly rumbled all year about the need to expand and about possibly leaving downtown. Tom Powers, a visiting UA assistant architecture professor, read those newspaper accounts and decided to make TMA the project for his Architecture 401 Design Studio.

Powers drew up an overview for his students requiring 600,000 square feet – the equivalent of three Wal-Marts – on the 1.7 acres known as Presidio Terrace due west of the art museum. The mission was to build a new spot for the Tucson Museum of Art within an office/residential/commercial setting with 1,100 underground parking spaces on the Presidio Terrace/Tucson Water block at Alameda and Granada.

“Let’s not mince words here, some of these are 40 stories,” said Powers, who until a year ago was a partner in the downtown Rialto Block and Depot Plaza projects.

Powers based the 600,000 square feet on the total square footage that the UniSource Tower would have had if the planned second tower had been built at 1 S. Church Ave.

Powers has an urban mantra shared by others seeking downtown revitalization.

“Where we see vast land of desert, we see it as available to our folly for expansion,” Powers said. “That has to stop.”

The students met with Knight several times to learn about the museum and its needs. Their designs had to include 100,000 square feet for TMA, a restaurant, two cafes and an assortment of office, commercial and residential space.

Some students set the museum apart in a separate building, some had it on the ground floor of their towers, one had the museum swirling upward with layers of condos between layers of museum.

“We started with just the Presidio Terrace site,” Knight said. “They started expanding the scope from there (to include the neighboring Tucson Water building) to make a major statement. That far exceeded the vision of the museum.”

Kara Eberle, 21, a fourth-year architecture student, who is enrolled in the five-year program, from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, designed two box towers linked by a curved, elevated tower on stilts that would reach 617 feet into the sky (The UniSource Tower is 330 feet). She said Tucson and the art museum need an architectural icon.

“I didn’t even know the museum existed before this project,” Eberle said. “The signage is horrible. The museum needs something to draw people to the door. It was hard to find even with a map.”

This tower is a step toward reducing the need to commute from the suburbs, said fourth- year architecture student David Adriaanse, 23, a native of The Netherlands who has lived in the U.S. for 13 years.

“Right now, you live here, you work there,” Adriaanse said. “This is an opportunity to bring it all together. Something much more integrated than what we have now. It’s an urban place. There’s buildings. There isn’t an exact reason to be downtown yet.”

Adriaanse’s two rounded towers are linked with bridges, a nod to the Petronas Towers in Malaysia. He proposes 220 condos, 200,000 square feet of office space and a first floor museum.

Powers, Knight and the students were quite aware of the virulent opposition of some El Presidio Neighborhood residents to the seven-story proposal for Presidio Terrace two years ago by developer Peggy Noonan, whose development agreement with the city ultimately was terminated one year ago. Noonan’s proposal won a zoning change that increased the height limit from 52 feet to 100 feet.

For the seven-story Presidio Terrace proposals, residents living closest to the site had the loudest opposition to the height and the farther away people lived, the less they objected to the height. The El Presidio Neighborhood Association ultimately endorsed the project.

“The way we like to proceed with these type of proposals is hopefully we’re involved in the process from the beginning, and hopefully we reach a consensus,” said Rick Luyties, president of the El Presidio Neighborhood Association.

City Councilwoman Nina Trasoff, who attended the student tower presentations, isn’t enamored with 30 or 40 stories, but she equally does not want to limit the Presidio Terrace site to two or three stories.

“It’s important to talk about what’s appropriate,” Trasoff said. “I was thoroughly taken by the creativity where you just open the door to all possibility.”

That area of downtown was limited to a 1980s La Encantada Planned Area of Development, which set a maximum building heights at 52 feet. The zoning for Presidio Terrace, however, was changed to 100 feet in 2006.

The city apparently has no limitations on how tall a building in Tucson can be, said Albert Elias, director of the city’s urban planning and design department.