Frank Lloyd Wright gets the tour buses, but Ralph Haver shaped the Scottsdale people actually lived in. His firm designed tract houses, schools, banks, apartments, townhouses and the building that served as City Hall from 1963 to 1968. His son Bucky summed up the style for Modern Phoenix: “He wasn’t being Modern, he was being cheap!” That’s the most useful thing anyone has said about midcentury architecture in the Valley.
This note gathers his Scottsdale work in one place, which nobody else seems to have done. Many of the attributions rest on oral history, because the firm’s records mostly don’t survive. We say where that’s the case.
Who he was
Haver was born in Pasadena in 1915, the son of a brick mason, and studied architecture at USC. Even the basic dates of his career differ by source:
- Graduation and first Phoenix job. The city’s 2021 preservation plan for the Kimsey Building says he graduated in 1937 and came to Phoenix in 1941 to work for Gilmore & Varney. Modern Phoenix’s chronology says he graduated in 1941 and joined Gilmore & Varney in 1942.
- Settling in Phoenix. The sources agree he served in the Army Corps of Engineers during the war. They also agree that after his discharge in 1946 he settled in Phoenix, working alongside his father Harry and his brother Robert, a builder, who had moved there first.
Ed Varney, who later designed the Hotel Valley Ho, was his mentor and stayed a lifelong friend. In 1952 Haver took on Jimmie Nunn as a partner, and the firm ran for about thirty years under a string of names: Haver & Nunn, Haver Nunn & Jensen, Haver Nunn & Nelson, Haver Nunn & Collamer. The firm’s 1967 portfolio claimed some 250 projects and roughly 20,000 tract homes across Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. Haver died in Scottsdale in 1987.
Modern Phoenix also stresses that “Haver” often meant the firm rather than the man. James Salter set the look of the firm’s award-winning years in the 1960s, and other principals designed buildings that went out under Haver’s name.
How to spot a Haver
The city’s preservation plan gives a checklist:
- a low-pitched gable facing the street, with the beam ends projecting
- deep overhangs on a wood post-and-beam frame
- transom glass filling the gable
- full walls of glass
- Superlite block, including the textured “Shado-Wall” and geometric breeze block
- clinker-brick wainscot, slump block or board-and-batten to warm up the modern lines
In the houses, add the “patio-port,” a carport that doubles as a front patio. Haver let local context win when it mattered: downtown, inside the cowboy-themed “West’s Most Western Town,” he wrapped his modern frames in Western dress.
What survives
Pima Plaza / Feltman Building, 7221–7237 E. 1st Avenue. This is his oldest Scottsdale building: a board-and-batten commercial row that Modern Phoenix calls “a temple of redwood.” Wikipedia and most of the city’s Kimsey plan date it to 1952; Modern Phoenix’s chronology and the city’s driving tour say 1953. The name goes back to 1952, when nine local businessmen, the Feltmans among them, laid out a “dignified Western” shopping square called Pima Plaza on First Avenue between Scottsdale Road and Brown (1952 covers the deal). Don’t confuse it with the older Pima Plaza: around 1918 that was the nickname for the stretch of First Avenue where Akimel O’odham farmers tied their wagons (the 1910s). The modern building took the name; the history belongs to the wagons.
The Kimsey Building, 7120 E. Indian School Road. Developer David J. Friedman’s Butler Homes put up this two-story office building, also called the Triangle Building, on land leased from the Kimsey family. The city leased the west half in April 1963 and ran the government from there until the new City Hall opened in 1968. The construction date isn’t settled: the preservation plan says Haver designed it in 1961, the driving tour says 1962, the register says 1963, and Wikipedia’s Haver list says 1960. It was placed on the register in 2021 and is being folded into a new apartment and hotel project. The building has its own page.
Town & Country Scottsdale (1958–60). Builder Woody Woodworth’s 62 Haver Homes at 74th Street and Oak went on the city register in 2005. Modern Phoenix calls them the first modern-style neighborhood in the Valley to be designated historic. Full details are in our historic districts field guide.
Villa Monterey (from 1961). Dave Friedman’s townhouse “casita colony” on Miller Road. The register credits Ralph Haver and Associates and the Kimsey plan agrees, but the city’s driving tour credits only Friedman. Look for the Haver bones (the block shells and low roofs) under the Spanish Colonial and Territorial costumes, which were Friedman’s idea. See the field guide for more.
Townhouses for Dell Trailor. Both Wikipedia’s works list and Modern Phoenix’s chronology include Golden Keys (1964), Villa d’Este (1966) and Villa Adrian (1970), all in Scottsdale. Royale Gardens on North 72nd Way is disputed. Wikipedia credits Haver and dates it 1968; the city dates it 1970 and calls the architects unknown. The Kimsey plan’s list of Haver’s Scottsdale work adds Mayo’s Furniture (1968) and the Sentry Center (1973). We haven’t confirmed either one standing.
Holiday Park (1958). Modern Phoenix lists Haver fourplexes for Omega Construction here. The city’s postwar multifamily survey ruled a Holiday Park complex ineligible for the register because many of its buildings had been altered. The survey doesn’t say whether that complex was the Haver group.
What’s gone
- Coronado High School (1960). A Haver & Nunn design. Its folded-plate roof on precast Y-shaped columns could be seen from a long way off, and cast-concrete hyperbolic paraboloid “parasols” shaded the walks. Modern Phoenix tells a good story about it: the school had to open before the sidewalks were poured, so Haver let students walk where they liked and paved their paths afterward. Most of the campus was demolished around 2006–07. Modern Phoenix says the waffle-roofed auditorium survives and that the roofline and the student mural were “preserved to some extent.”
- Kaibab Elementary. It won an AIA regional award and has been demolished. It’s dated 1957 by the Kimsey plan and Modern Phoenix, and 1962 by Wikipedia.
- Hohokam Elementary (1959). The Kimsey plan says “mostly demolished”; Modern Phoenix says partially.
- First Federal Savings & Loan (1963). It stood near Fashion Square and won both an NSID award for excellence of design and an AIA Award of Merit. It was demolished.
- Polynesian Plaza and its Polynesian Dairy Queen (1964). The plaza was razed. In 2021 the Kimsey plan said the Dairy Queen was demolished “but may be reconstructed.” We found no sign that it was.
Our lost midcentury Scottsdale note puts these in the wider list.
The Hilton question
Did Haver design the Scottsdale Hilton at Scottsdale Road and Lincoln? Here’s the evidence on each side.
For:
- Wikipedia’s works list includes “1965 Hilton Hotel at Scottsdale Rd & Lincoln.”
- Our Bob Karatz page cites a real-estate account crediting Haver with both the hotel and the Scottsdale Hilton Casitas.
Against:
- The site’s own Hilton page and the Karatz page say Karatz opened the hotel in 1973, eight years after the date on that list.
- Modern Phoenix founder Alison King wrote most of the Wikipedia article, yet her own Haver chronology on Modern Phoenix doesn’t include the Hilton.
- The Kimsey plan’s list of Haver’s Scottsdale buildings doesn’t include it either.
So the credit is plausible but unproven. Either the list’s date is wrong, the entry refers to an earlier project at the corner, or the credit itself is wrong. Three places could settle it:
- the hotel’s building permit, through the city’s eServices document viewer (EDM), searched by address
- the Arizona Republic and Scottsdale Progress opening coverage in 1973, which usually named the architect
- the firm’s drawings
The drawings are the problem. According to Wikipedia, most of Haver & Nunn’s records ended up in a dumpster when the firm closed in 1993, and that’s why so much of this list rests on memory.
A Haver drive
- Pima Plaza on First Avenue. Park and walk the redwood row.
- The Kimsey Building at Indian School and Scottsdale. Stand across the street to see the gable end and the block screen at the stairs.
- Town & Country at 74th and Oak. Walk it; the Coronado High site is across the diagonal.
- Villa Monterey along Miller and Chaparral.
- Royale Gardens on North 72nd Way. View it from the entry only.
Everything on the drive is a street view. For the Wright, Soleri and Varney side of the story, see Frank Lloyd Wright and the desert.