Eleven years from idea to door
The idea dated to 1988, when the Scottsdale Cultural Council — the nonprofit the city had created the year before to run its arts institutions — began arguing that a town selling itself as an arts capital needed a museum that collected something newer than bronze cowboys. The Civic Center campus that Bennie Gonzales had planned in 1966 had a city hall, a library, and, since October 1975, a performing-arts center; its galleries were an afterthought. Money, as usual, took most of a decade. The site, when it came, was unglamorous: the five-screen movie theater next door to the Center for the Arts, closed and available.
Will Bruder, the Phoenix architect then finishing the Burton Barr Central Library, took the cinema apart from the inside. He kept the box and turned it into five clean galleries with polished concrete floors, wrapped the exterior in a curving skin of gray-green stucco and perforated metal, and set a James Turrell skyspace, Knight Rise, in a courtyard where visitors could sit and watch the desert sky change color through an oval in the ceiling. In February 1999 SMoCA opened — the first museum in Arizona dedicated entirely to modern and contemporary art, architecture, and design.
What it changed
The museum gave the Civic Center a second pole. For a quarter-century the campus had been where Scottsdale’s government and performing arts lived; now it was also where the city looked at the present tense. SMoCA’s exhibitions, its architecture program, and its sponsorship of public art fed directly into the city’s growing confidence in contemporary work — the Soleri Bridge on the canal in 2010, the light-art festival Canal Convergence from 2012, the public-art program that became a national model. The West’s Most Western Town now had a credible answer to the question of what else it was.
The rest of the year — Los Arcos Mall fading, the Loop 101 racing up the eastern edge — is at 1999, and the decade’s arc in the 1990s chapter.