From Brick to Bauhaus: 20th century Architecture in Flagstaff, Arizona

Flagstaff's sure got a lot of brick. Tooling around is like touring Birmingham in New York, or the innumerable railroad bergs of Pennsylvania. Yet there's more style around Flag than meets the casual glance, if one learns how to look. Let's take a virtual trip across architectural time together, northern Arizona-style.

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Flagstaff Style

Flagstaff architect Paul Moore is the first to admit Flagstaff doesn't really have a style of its own.

"There's a lot of stonework, heavy timber use, the pitched roofs and heavy patterning of the windows, how the windows are set," he explains. "I think historically there's a certain pattern that makes a pleasing arrangement of windows here. We've got the carefully-detailed window trim, rough-hewn logs, the vigas [log ceiling beams] , the white stucco look. All from the east coast. We have the Santa Fe Style elements in some parts of town, with the flat roofs and adobe of Mexico. And there's the western element from California, which was developed before this area: the Craftsman style of hand-hewn buildings with well-developed details of stonework."

We're inside his sunny south-facing architectural dance studio in South Flag.

Moore says he keeps talking about the pitched roofs as an example of design specific to Flagstaff. Makes sense; sheds snow.

Moore sits back and continues: "The town was really developed by white people at the turn it the century. We have a more organic feel with a lot of the houses, brought from architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Sullivan. We have a lot of ornamentation downtown. We have things like that, as opposed to the modern movement style, with a lot of glass and steel and clean lines."

Moore describes our style as "Vernacular", which I take to mean as less-than-strictly-authentic.

Time to walk around town.

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Brick

Flagstaff's got the lumber, good flagstone and solid basalt blocks for building, and that brought the railroads, which in turn brought us bricks.

The advantages of a brick, Moore relates, are durability and a pleasing aesthetic, wrapped in a low-maintanence, inexpensive human-sized package. "You can put your hands around it: it gives you a human scale," he adds.

Moore says the use of brick was an early indicator of coming globalism. The use of local materials came more naturally 100 years ago than it does today, he explains.

"The brick is in that middle ground of architecture, not really a style in itself," Moore says. "Once the railroad came in, the brick came with it, with the east coast people."

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