What it is
Burton Barr Central Library is the main library of the City of Phoenix and the most important modern building in the Valley. Will Bruder designed it with DWL Architects; construction ran from 1989 and it opened in May 1995, a five-story, 280,000-square-foot box at Central Avenue and McDowell Road, on the north edge of downtown beside Hance Park. Bruder described it as a mesa split by a canyon. The east and west walls are curved and clad in copper that has gone dark in thirty years of sun; the north face is glass under fabric shade sails; the south face is glass behind computer-controlled louvers that move with the sun. The split down the middle is the crystal canyon, a five-level atrium of glass, steel and three glass elevators, and at the top is the Great Reading Room, about an acre of open floor under a roof hung from a tensegrity structure of cables and masts after Buckminster Fuller, lit through skylights that sit on top of the columns like candles.
It is named for Burton Barr, the Republican majority leader of the Arizona House of Representatives from 1966 to 1986, the legislator who ran the state through its growth decades. It is a working library, and a very busy one, and it is free.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because the desert-architecture story Scottsdale tells about itself, which our Frank Lloyd Wright and desert architecture note lays out, has a modern chapter and this is it. Bruder studied with Paolo Soleri at Cosanti and designed the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art four years after this; our Will Bruder page explains the connection. SMoCA is the small, careful version. This is the building he made his name with, and standing in the reading room at four in the afternoon is the quickest way to understand what people mean when they say desert modernism.
The practical version
Twenty-five minutes from Old Town, down Central Avenue. Free lot off Central, light rail at the door. Open seven days, with hours into the evening Tuesday through Thursday. Ride the glass elevator to five, walk the reading room, come down the stairs. Forty-five minutes; the Phoenix Art Museum is across the street for the rest of the afternoon.
When to go
Any day it is open, and the building is better on a weekday afternoon, when the reading room is nearly empty, the south-wall louvers are tracking the sun and the atrium has the light to itself. Late afternoon in winter, when the sun is low and the copper walls catch it, is the hour to photograph the outside.
The one scheduled moment is the summer solstice, around 12:30 PM in late June, when the skylights Bruder designed for the occasion drop circles of sunlight onto the tops of the fifth-floor columns for a few minutes. The library opens the room for it and a crowd of a few hundred gathers; it is one of the few architecture events in Phoenix with a date on it.
What to see, in order
- The entrance on Central. A slot cut into the copper wall, deliberately low and dark, so the atrium reads as a surprise.
- The crystal canyon. The five-level atrium. Take the glass elevator up and the stairs down; the view changes at each landing.
- The Great Reading Room. The fifth floor, an acre under the cable-hung roof. Look up at the skylights on the columns, then north through the glass to Piestewa Peak and the Phoenix Mountains.
- The louvers. On the south wall, best seen from inside on an upper floor; they are computer-driven and move as the day goes.
- The children’s floor and the gallery on the first level, if you have time; the library runs exhibitions and a rare-book room by appointment.
Around it
The Phoenix Art Museum is directly across Central Avenue, the Heard Museum half a mile north, Hance Park and the Japanese Friendship Garden two blocks south and west, and Roosevelt Row’s galleries and bars a few blocks east. The library is the free, air-conditioned anchor of a downtown culture day, which is how our Scottsdale on a budget note files it.
With kids
Good for an hour. The glass elevators are the ride, the children’s area on the first floor is large, and the reading room asks for quiet.
The story
Phoenix set out to build a new central library in the late 1980s, when Central Avenue north of downtown was a strip of banks and parking. Will Bruder, who had apprenticed under Paolo Soleri and built his practice on small houses and the odd public building in the Valley, designed it with DWL Architects around a concept rather than a facade: a mesa, copper on its long sides, split by a canyon of glass, with a roof floated above the top floor on cables so that the reading room would have no visible structure overhead. Construction took from 1989 to 1995, which is long for a library and reflects both the engineering and a city that had never built anything like it. It opened in May 1995, named for Burton Barr, the House majority leader whose two decades of budgets had paid for much of what the state built in those years.
The building made Bruder’s reputation nationally, and the acre of reading room with its solstice skylights became the thing visiting architects asked to see in Phoenix. It also made him Scottsdale’s choice for the conversion of a closed cinema into the Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 1999 and completed the Civic Center campus; the two buildings are the start and end of the same decade of his work.
The flood is the other chapter. On the night of July 15, 2017 a monsoon storm lifted the roof tiles and the waterproof membrane under them; a sprinkler main burst, and water ran down through all five floors. About 6,000 books were damaged and the library closed for eleven months, during which a city review found the fire-suppression system’s maintenance problems had been known. Insurance paid nine million dollars; the library reopened on June 16, 2018 with new carpets, new systems and the reading room intact. A roof and fire-suppression upgrade began in November 2024 with the building open.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s own central library, the Civic Center Library, is a 1960s Bennie Gonzales building on the campus Bruder later finished; the Scottsdale Public Library system is the one Scottsdale residents use day to day. Burton Barr is the one they drive to once, for the building, and then tell people about.
Getting there
Indian School Road west from Old Town to Central Avenue, then south two miles to McDowell Road; the library is on the east side of Central just below McDowell, with its lot off Central, about twenty-five minutes with no traffic. From the Camelback corridor, Central Avenue south the whole way. The McDowell/Central light-rail stop is at the front door, which matters if you are staying downtown and not if you are staying in Scottsdale.