The architect

James S. Wood / Staff
Jim Gresham stands on the UA mall overlooking the Integrated Learning Center, which he says may be his finest building - so far.

Photos by James S. Wood / Staff
His addition to a state office complex at Granada Avenue and Alameda Street Downtown is a
Gresham standout with its wavy wall of mirrored glass windows and geometrically arranged brick.

"It was the client's fault. They bought it," a grinning Gresham says of his design for the former Western Savings and Loan on Ina Road.

For its monument to undergraduate education, the UA turned to the man whose fingerprints are all over Tucson.

By Tom Beal
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

Architect Jim Gresham says the Integrated Learning Center at the heart of the UA mall may be the finest building he's ever designed, but don't plan on driving by to take a look. You can't actually see the building until you walk into it.

Which is exactly why Gresham likes it so much.

"The very nature of the building meant it couldn't be a sculptural artifact. It heightens the importance of looking at architecture as being an experience," Gresham said.

The motives of University of Arizona administrators complicated Gresham's job. They wanted the underground building, with its freshman center and 14 high-tech classrooms devoted to general education, to make a statement about the university's commitment to its undergraduates.

"We gave him the impossible task of building a monument that couldn't be seen," said Michael Gottfredson, who led the fight for the project when he was the UA's vice president for undergraduate education.

Gresham succeeded, according to students and faculty members who just completed the building's shakedown semester, though it's not been fully tested. Budget woes have delayed 80 percent of its high-tech gimmicks and professors haven't mastered the technology that is in place. (See related story on facing page.)

It's also premature to call this subterranean marvel the pinnacle of Gresham's career. He always counts on his next design being his best and, at age 73, he's got another handful of them under way.

This one, though, truly gave him the opportunity to practice what he preaches. "Architecture," says Gresham, "is really a background to the life of a city and its inhabitants."

Gresham has been creating Tucson's backdrop for 46 years - and preserving it, a role he considers an equally important part of the architect's responsibility.

In addition to designing a series of award-winning buildings in Tucson, Gresham has had a design role in preserving Tucson's architectural history. He designed the streetscape for the Temple of Music and Art. He helped restore and adapt the Manning House and his favorite, the Steinfeld House at 300 N. Main Ave., to new uses.

Gresham was also an early member of the Patronato, the group formed to restore Mission San Xavier del Bac. He was the group's president from 1989 to 1995 and is still on its board.

His voice was also instrumental in convincing Tucson Unified School District to restore, rather than tear down, Catalina High School - the building that brought Gresham to Tucson in 1956 to work for architect Nick Sakellar, who had won national acclaim for the wide, light-filled corridors that were key to the school's design.

Kirby Lockard, professor emeritus at the UA's College of Architecture, joined Gresham on the Catalina crusade and says Gresham demonstrated characteristic integrity in opposing a board that controlled so many large building projects.

"I admire him a great deal. He's a good architect and a good guy." And unlike many heads of architectural firms, Lockard said, "he's still the guy who does the design."

Gresham can't imagine doing anything else. He's been designing buildings since his high school years at Arsenal Tech in Indianapolis. Gresham was headed toward aeronautical engineering or astronomy when he took a course in architectural design. He never looked back.

He spent two years at the University of Michigan where the architecture professors were disciples of Mies van der Rohe, father of modernist "less is more" skyscraper design. Gresham chafed at their emphasis on simple, modernist design that he found boring - at the time. He wanted a little more Frank Lloyd Wright in his life and headed for the University of Oklahoma, where Bruce Goff, a friend of Wright's and a noted iconoclast, had taken the helm of the architecture college and was breaking all the rules.

After graduation, Gresham was one of two students in the country selected to study at the American Academy in Rome. He spent two years falling in love with the rich urban forms of Italian cities and touring Italy and Europe with Robert Venturi, the noted architectural theorist and designer.

Gresham said his travels have given him an appreciation for buildings that survive changing uses over centuries, particularly the simple form of the Italian palazzo.

Gresham's favorite Tucson-area school design, for instance, is Canyon View Elementary, just across the street from the Sabino Canyon visitors center. It's not a single building but a series of simple, rectangular ones, connected by covered walkways. Gresham said the site dictated the design.

There was nowhere to put a big building that didn't tear up the lush vegetation or interfere with the washes that ran through the property, he said.

In a way, Gresham has come to embrace the discipline of the simple Modern form he fled at Michigan. He now considers Mies van der Rohe the most important modern architect. "I say this not because his work should be copied but rather that his work succeeds at three levels: It evidences extremely high levels of craftsmanship; it is eminently buildable; and it creates good urban form."

Which is not to say Gresham shies away from artistic expression or that he has never designed a building that says, "Hey, look at me." The one that most resembles a sculptural statement, he says, is the former Western Savings and Loan on Ina Road, just east of La Cholla, with its massive tiled arch at the entrance.

"It was the client's fault," he says with a grin. "They bought it; money was no object."

He's not used to working that way. The grandiose edges of an architect's design are usually smoothed flat by the client's wishes and his pocketbook. "I don't think an architect can design a good building without that interaction," he said.

The interaction also helps the client, Gresham said. When he designed an addition that tied together two distinct state office buildings at Granada Avenue and Alameda Street Downtown, Gresham simplified the office space and convinced the state to use the money saved for a covered courtyard that wasn't part of the proposal.

That courtyard became the essence of the building, said R. Brooks Jeffery, curator of preservation studies for the College of Architecture, who cites the building in "A Guide to Tucson Architecture," which he co-wrote with Anne M. Nequette.

The most startling feature of the state office building is its wavy wall of mirrored glass windows and geometrically arranged red-and-white brick. You can see a variation of the brick pattern on the facing of the parking lot in front of the UA Health Sciences Center on North Campbell Avenue. It's used also on the library behind the complex, a building Lockard considers Gresham's best.

Lockard sees the state building's design as tribute to the tiled dome of architect Roy Place's old Pima County Courthouse, up the street from it at Alameda and Church Avenue.

Gresham chose his cubicle on the seventh floor of his firm's offices in the building across the street because it had the best view of the courthouse, but he says he didn't intend to reflect it in the state building addition. He points east, to where Alameda Street meets Stone Avenue at William Engelhardt's brick bank building (now a Pima College office). That's what he was referring to.

"Tucson 100 years ago was all brick," said Gresham. "There was a richness to that architecture; it's the longest-standing architectural tradition in Tucson."

Jeffery was pleased, though not surprised, to find Gresham's signature use of geometrically arranged brick at the Integrated Learning Center. "Jim is a modern master of creative brick use," he said.

The visible portions of the Integrated Learning Center use red brick, some of it raised to cast shadows that make its simple geometry appear more complex. He combines it with exposed concrete and natural aluminum.

It's accessed by aluminum-clad elevator buildings on either side of the mall or by the grand stairwell that Gresham patterned on stairwells he had seen on vacation in India.

Look down the mall from its eastern gateway and the only evidence you'll see of a building is a low metal railing, painted the color of natural aluminum. It doesn't interfere with your view of the now-famous Joseph Wood Krutch garden (home of the boojum battle) or the university's oldest building, Old Main, beyond it.

Go to the railing, peer over, and you're looking through an opening the size of a high-school gym into a sunken courtyard onto which the Integrated Learning Center opens.

An interior arcade shades the walls, many of which are floor-to-ceiling glass, tinted green and frosted at the bottom. These underground offices, which many feared would be bunkerlike, let in more natural light than any other building on campus.

When Gresham's firm, Gresham & Beach Architects, was competing for the project,"the master plan dictated keeping the mall completely intact," he said.

Gresham proposed an opening, nevertheless. He gave the committee a few sketches and was frankly surprised when his firm was selected.

Gresham couldn't imagine an underground building without natural light. "Daylight is absolutely essential to creating a human atmosphere," he said.

Light also comes from four skylights in the interior, strongly opposed by the university as a future maintenance nightmare. It was the one topic on which Gresham's attention to detail actually became annoying, said Gottfredson.

But Gresham was very convincing, he said, "and it turns out that every single thing he says is right," Gottfredson said.

Lynne Tronsdal, associate dean for undergraduate studies, said the finished building achieves the purpose for which it was built. It sits smack-dab in the middle of student life, between the library and the Student Union. It steps up through an information commons, crowded day and night with students using computers, into the basement of the Main Library.

It serves as a symbolic and actual center for incoming students, especially those who have no attachment to one of the university's colleges - "the courageously clueless," as Tronsdal calls them.

Tronsdal said Gresham or his partner George Casey, the job's project manager, was at every weekly construction meeting, offering input on "the color of a tile or the size of a urinal."

Casey said he, Gresham and others put in many more hours on the project than the firm collected in fees. "Everybody involved in this project lost his shirt," he said. "This is a project that should have been DOA years ago."

But Casey said Gresham has taught him, over 23 years together, "the value of having a vision and sticking with it." Architecture, he said, "is the life juice that keeps Jim going."

Gresham's wife, Flo, recognized that early in their 26-year marriage. "I have to admit that when we were first married and I realized the impact of his devotion to lady architecture, I said 'uh-oh.' " She decided to just become his biggest fan.

Gresham doesn't regard his determined behavior as unusual - old-fashioned, maybe. He has hobbies - photography, bike-riding, writing - but they don't keep him from being first in the office many mornings.

He expresses amazement at some of his younger associates.

They take long weekends to go rock-climbing or some such thing. "They seem to actually have lives, avocations" he said.

Not Gresham. He has a vocation, a calling: He's an architect.