What it means
Midcentury modern is the architecture of roughly the end of World War II to the mid-1970s: flat or barely pitched roofs, long horizontal lines, glass walls, exposed structure, and decoration done with materials instead of ornament. Desert modern is that style taught to live with the Sonoran sun: deep overhangs, carports, perforated block screens that cast patterned shade, and windows placed to look at a patio rather than into the afternoon.
In Scottsdale both labels point first to the Hotel Valley Ho, the long, low modernist hotel on Main Street, and then to the neighborhoods of single-story houses built for Motorola engineers and young families in the 1950s and 60s. Locals who love these houses use architects’ names as adjectives: a “Haver,” a “Beadle.” Real estate agents use “midcentury” for anything with a carport.
The bigger architectural story, from Taliesin to the Civic Center, is in the architecture guide. This page explains the label.
Where you’ll meet it
On listings in South and central Scottsdale, at the Valley Ho’s pool, on Modern Phoenix home tour weekends, in the ranch house argument about what counts as modern, and on the Mountain Shadows site, where a 2017 resort pays homage to a 1959 one.
Where the word came from
Nobody called these buildings midcentury when they were new; they were “contemporary” or simply “modern.” The city’s own historic report on Town and Country Scottsdale uses “Contemporary” for Haver’s designs. The phrase midcentury modern turned up sporadically in print for decades, but Cara Greenberg’s 1984 book Midcentury Modern: Furniture of the 1950s is credited with fixing it as the name of a style. Desert modernism is the regional cousin, most associated with Palm Springs.
Scottsdale’s version arrived all at once. In November 1956 the Safari Hotel opened on Scottsdale Road, designed by Al Beadle, a self-taught modernist who learned to build with the Navy Seabees. On December 20, 1956, the Valley Ho opened a few blocks away, designed by the Wright-trained Edward L. Varney. A cow town that sold itself as the West’s most Western suddenly had two glass-and-concrete resorts.
The houses followed. Ralph Haver’s firm designed an estimated 20,000 tract homes in the Southwest, small and affordable, with low-pitched roofs and clerestory windows. In Scottsdale, builder Fred Woodworth put 62 Haver houses on 15 acres as Town and Country Scottsdale and began selling them in January 1959, at $13,500 to $16,950.
What it is not
Midcentury modern is not the same as the ranch house, though the two shared the same decades and the same subdivisions. The city’s report notes that Town and Country stood out because nearly every other postwar development in Scottsdale offered standard Ranch styles. Nor is it the glass towers going up on Scottsdale Road now; those start from air conditioning, not shade.
The fine print
The loss and the save. The Safari closed in 1998, the year Beadle died, and was demolished in 1999. The Valley Ho, which Ramada bought in 1973 and slowly buried in beige, was bought by the local firm Westroc in 2001, restored for roughly $80 million and reopened in December 2005; in 2008 a tower was built from Varney’s unbuilt design. Those two outcomes, two years apart, are the hinge of local preservation.
The movement. Alison King, who grew up in a Scottsdale Hallcraft tract, launched modernphoenix.net in 2003 and ran the first home tour within six months; it sold 100 tickets. The tour now anchors a ten-day Modern Phoenix Week, and about 1,000 tickets sell within hours. Her Beadle Registry catalogs more than 80 residences and 200 other Beadle designs, and the movement counts Scottsdale’s 1955 Glass and Garden Church among its saves.
The register. Town and Country Scottsdale is a city historic district; when it was surveyed, 84 percent of its homes still contributed to its historic character. The detail that made it unusual was structural as well as stylistic: Haver used three load-bearing walls instead of the usual four.