Why he matters
In the mid-1960s Scottsdale was a boomtown with a slogan, “The West’s Most Western Town,” and no civic architecture to back it up. Bennie Gonzales gave it some. His City Hall and Civic Center Library took the adobe forms of the Sonoran and Pueblo traditions and turned them into white modernism: thick battered walls, deep shade, buildings that look shaped by hand at a monumental scale.
The result was a style other buildings in town have been borrowing ever since. When people talk about the “Scottsdale look” in civic and commercial architecture, they are mostly describing Gonzales.
Where to find his mark today
Scottsdale Civic Center. The Civic Center is his campus: City Hall and the library at one end, lawns, fountains and sculpture in between, renovated in 2023.
Center for the Performing Arts. Opened on October 23, 1975 as the Center for the Arts, the building that completed his plan.
The kiva. City Hall’s sunken council chamber, where the public looks down on its elected officials, is the most pointed piece of civic design in the Valley.
The town he walked into
The city that hired Gonzales in 1965 was growing faster than almost anywhere in the country, from about 10,000 people at the start of the 1960s to nearly 68,000 by the end. It had adopted a charter and a billboard ban, but its city hall had been, among other places, the Little Red Schoolhouse, which also held the entire public library from 1963 to 1968. The new civic mall needed that ground, and in 1968 the old schoolhouse was slated for demolition; it survived to become the city’s history museum.
Gonzales’s campus changed what Scottsdale could host. The lawns incubated the Scottsdale Arts Festival and even the early Barrett-Jackson auctions, and the arts district that spread from here into Old Town gave the city the museums and galleries it sells today.
The full story
Bennie Gonzales was an Arizona architect, and Scottsdale went looking for one in 1965. The city was booming but had no real government quarter, and it hired Gonzales to design one. His 1966 master plan went further than a city hall: it laid out a mall of lawns, fountains and low sculptural buildings in white stucco, with government at one end and culture at the other.
The first half opened in 1968. City Hall and the Civic Center Library were white, sculptural and adobe-soft, organized around shaded courtyards. He had wanted actual adobe, but building regulations forced masonry and concrete, and the compromise arguably made the sculpture sharper. The same year, old-timers founded the Scottsdale Historical Society, determined that the boom would not erase the farm town the new buildings replaced.
The culture half took longer. Money and momentum arrived in the early 1970s, as McCormick Ranch sold and the Greenbelt rose, and on October 23, 1975, the Scottsdale Center for the Arts opened on the southeastern edge of the mall with a concert by Roger Miller. Gonzales gave it the same vocabulary as City Hall around an 800-seat theater, gallery space and a small cinema. The building, now the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, remains Scottsdale Arts’ main stage, and SMoCA joined it in a converted cinema next door in 1999.
He is sometimes listed among the architects drawn to the Valley by Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin West, though his own commissions here do not record a Wright apprenticeship. He died in 2004. The campus got its first major overhaul in the 2020s, reopening in 2023 after a roughly $33 million renovation that added an amphitheater and a stage while leaving his buildings as the frame. The decade he defined is told in the boomtown era.