A bridge sixty years in the making
Paolo Soleri’s desert credentials ran deep. He had come to Arizona as a young apprentice at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, then spent his career at Arcosanti, his experimental city to the north, sketching visionary urban forms — and, again and again, bridges. He published bridge designs across the decades; not one was ever built. So when Scottsdale Public Art commissioned him to span the Arizona Canal at the Waterfront, it was offering a man in his nineties a first. On the December morning of the dedication, with the 91-year-old architect present, the city cut the ribbon on the only bridge Soleri ever saw realized.
The design was pure Soleri: less a crossing than an instrument. The twin pylons read the sun, their noon shadow tracking the year toward each solstice — so a structure standing over the 1885 canal that made the farm town possible keeps time the way the canal’s builders once did, by sun and season.
What the bridge set in motion
The timing looked odd and turned out to be perfect. The dedication came in the trough of the recession — the census that year counted a city smaller than its boom-era estimates — and Scottsdale had little else to celebrate. But the bridge and its plaza gave the Waterfront the civic centerpiece its 2000s buildout had lacked. A canal bank long treated as pure infrastructure became a place people went on purpose, and Canal Convergence grew into the city’s signature public-art festival with the bridge as its stage.
It also set the register for the decade that followed. Scottsdale’s recovery would be led as much by culture as by construction: the Museum of the West in 2015, the aquarium corridor in 2016, the canal glowing with art every fall. The first of those gestures was a solar clock built by a ninety-one-year-old, dedicated in the worst economy in memory. The rest of the year is at 2010, and the decade’s full arc is in the 2010s chapter.