Why he matters
Scottsdale’s Civic Center was drawn in the 1960s as a white-walled Southwestern campus, and for three decades it held city hall, a library and a performing-arts center. Will Bruder gave it its most contemporary building by starting with the least promising one: a closed movie theater next door. His conversion, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, opened in 1999 and turned the campus into a real cultural district.
He is also a link in the Valley’s chain of desert architects. Bruder learned to build as Paolo Soleri’s apprentice at Cosanti, practiced for decades from a studio he built himself in New River, and became one of the best-known Arizona architects of his generation.
Where to find his mark today
The Civic Center. SMoCA stands at the campus edge on Second Street, a gray-green box with Turrell’s skyspace in the courtyard.
Cosanti. Where he apprenticed in 1968 under Soleri, casting concrete in the desert. It is free to visit.
Temple Kol Ami. His 1994 Scottsdale synagogue, stone walls and courtyards, is a working congregation rather than a public site.
A theater into a museum
The best way into his Scottsdale work is the day page for February 1999, when SMoCA opened after eleven years of planning by the Scottsdale Cultural Council. The campus it completed began with Bennie Gonzales, whose 1960s Civic Center gave the town its city hall and library, and grew with the Center for the Arts in October 1975. Bruder’s teacher, Paolo Soleri, has his own page, and the decade that produced the museum is in the 1990s chapter.
The full story
Will Bruder was born in Milwaukee in 1946 and earned a fine-arts degree in sculpture at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1969, filling in with courses in structural engineering, philosophy, art history and planning. He never went to architecture school. In the summer of 1967 he joined Paolo Soleri’s silt workshop, and in 1968 he apprenticed at Cosanti in Paradise Valley, working on its concrete vaults and on Soleri’s book Arcology. A year in the office of Gunnar Birkerts followed.
He became a registered architect in 1973 and in 1974 opened a studio in New River, forty miles north of Phoenix, in a house and workshop he built himself. For two decades his work was mostly houses and modest public buildings around the Valley, and in 1987 he won the Rome Prize.
The 1990s brought the big public buildings. Temple Kol Ami, completed in Scottsdale in 1994, was planned as a small settlement of stone-walled buildings and narrow courts after ancient Jewish towns; the sanctuary and two classroom wings were built, and the masonry won an award from the state’s masonry guild. The Burton Barr Central Library in Phoenix followed in 1995 and made his name nationally.
In Scottsdale the defining commission was the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. The site was a closed five-screen United Artists theater beside the Center for the Arts. Bruder kept the box, turned the five auditoriums into five flexible galleries, and wrapped the outside in a curving skin of stucco and metal. SMoCA opened in February 1999, Arizona’s first museum devoted entirely to contemporary art, architecture and design, and James Turrell’s skyspace Knight Rise gave its courtyard a room made of sky.
He was later named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and AIA Arizona’s architect of the year, and in 2019 he moved his practice to Portland, Oregon. His Scottsdale buildings belong to the resort-metropolis era, when the city began spending its wealth on culture.