You would think that the central problem, the one basic inescapable most compelling issue of architecture in Phoenix would be The Sun. You would think we would stop pouring vast expanses of heat-absorbing black asphalt on the ground. You would think Phoenix would lead the nation in eliminating factors contributing to the urban heat island effect, because, y'know, it's hot enough already. Stop it! Everything is outgassing! It's hot enough!

You would think parking spaces would be aligned so you could always park facing northeast. You would think we would have shade. You would think every last building would have deep eaves and lovely shade and smart ventilation, be surrounded by cooling vegetation and oxygen-generating plants, and always have fenestration facing north and east, to prevent that blistering late-afternoon fireball effect from the southwest. You would think those simple cheap ideas like sun-orientation and high ceilings would be mandated in the building code. You would think every wide expanse of roof surface would be all solar collectors, maintained by (local utility) SRP in a networked scheme of simultaneous power collection and distribution.

And you would think that otherwise-intelligent people could explain the path of The Airborne Nuclear Fusion Furnace and Skin Cancer Generator traveling in the Tempe sky (rising in the southeast, setting in the southwest, never straying into the northern half of the sky, lower in the winter, higher in the summer).

At least the Nelson Fine Arts Center on the ASU campus in Tempe responds to the fact of The Sun. This catapults it ahead of 90% of the rest of the houses and buildings here, which in terms of window area and orientation might as well be in South Carolina or Milwaukee or Lake Tahoe. These houses and buildings don't know where the hell they are; they sing a quiet stupid song to themselves, doh-pee-doh, doh-pee-doh.

I think the Nelson might over-compensate though. It not only provides cool shade under a system of thick blocky concrete bunkers, but arguably provides protection from tactical nuclear weapons and coronal mass ejections.

It dates from 1989. It's a fine, tight, cohesive, formal, serious, rectilinear temple sort of building, but once you get to know it, it's friendly.

The architect is Antoine Predock.

Predock has star power, but he's not a jackass. Unlike Steven Holl (at Bellevue Washington) and Peter "Barking Madman" Eisenman (at the notorious Wexner Center), Predock's art museum does not compete with its displays for your attention, or expose priceless artwork to direct sunlight. You enter from the front, proceed down into cavernous shade then into deeper shade-vault, a sense of dark mystery building up around you, you nervously reach back for the well-worn handle of your machete (no just kidding), then arrive in a low square entry space called the Nymphaeum which has a pool and which is neither inside nor outside. There's a slight fragrance of damp concrete, but it's not unpleasant. It's the smell of safety.