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Tucson, Arizona | Published: 10.14.2007
"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."
– Walt Whitman
The architects of the new UA Poetry Center were given an exacting and contradictory task:
● Build a place to contain words, ideas, thoughts and emotions — not to mention chairs, tables, offices and 60,000 poetry books, chapbooks, periodicals, broadsides and audio- and videotapes, some of them quite rare and in need of permanent preservation.
● Make it a haven for the serious poets and writers who use its library and classrooms and an accessible space for those attending its public events.
● Encourage howling and contemplation; quiet reading and noisy discussion.
Architect Les Wallach is pleased that the center's users find poetry in his design but said he and his team at Line and Space Architects were primarily trying to design a building that met the program's current needs and its future hopes.
Or, as Frances Sjoberg, the center's literary director, wrote in tying the completed building to the programs that will be presented there: "What we want is a paradox. More gravity! More levity! More depth and literary shop talk for writers, and more accessible points of entry to keep the door open for new readers."
Sjoberg said the center has been beefing up staff for the challenge of matching its programs to the expanded vision expressed by the new center.
"We want to serve writers and their need for the nuances of poetry and what seems difficult or inaccessible to a reader approaching poetry for the first time. We must sustain Tucson's fantastic literary community," she said.
"But we really do want to build the audience. Poetry feeds each of us and really enriches the life of anyone who wants to take the time to step into it," Sjoberg said.
So — more public at the public events, beginning today with a communitywide housewarming. More elementary school field trips. More outreach. More volunteers. More public classes and a new intern program.
Center volunteer Tony Luebbermann, who has devoted his life to poetry since retiring from the budget and management world at the city of Tucson, loves the building and the expanding directions of the center.
He recognizes, though, that some center aficionados will be put off by the expanding mission and "the institutional answer to what was a very intimate and cozy space."
This is not a cozy building. Built of deep-gray block with broad overhangs, it is both understated and monumental, defined by its angular use of glass, concrete and metal.
The center is actually two buildings, separated by a high-ceilinged breezeway. Only the edge of the west building has a second story, where glass-walled offices and meeting rooms float above the library stacks.
Two windowless rooms at the south end are climate controlled and hold the center's rare or fragile books.
Streetside, the new Helen S. Schaefer building is straightforward in its stacks of gray blocks and its fat, flat roofs.
The surprise comes in the multiple layers of roof and shade structures, in towering window walls and in the two angled walls, one metal, one glass, on the southeast end.
The "Odeum," a small outdoor space for performance, is simply a cove beneath the leaning glass wall that creates shade for a few rows of sunken concrete benches. The metal wall next to it is angled in the opposite direction. "I like the tension of creating those angles," said Wallach, whose prize-winning, desert-adapted buildings in Tucson include the restaurant and art gallery at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and sculptural outhouses along the county's river parks.
Like the Desert Museum building, this one is desert friendly with its use of large shaded spaces, said R. Brooks Jeffery, associate dean of the UA College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and co-author of "A Guide to Tucson Architecture."
Jeffery said he likes the building both for its design and for being part of a welcome trend of "university buildings that don't look institutional."
Handsomely modern in appearance, the Poetry Center building is still inviting, said Gayatri Patwardhan, a graduate student in the UA College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.
"It's vibrant. It's energetic. The entryway is so welcoming and so friendly," she said. Patwardhan had simply strolled by for a look and found herself drawn into the breezeway between the buildings on Sept. 27 as alumni of the UA's creative-writing program gathered for the center's first indoor reading.
"They gave me a nametag and asked me to come in and listen," Patwardhan said.
She noted that it's possible to look through the sliding wall of the Humanities Room, across the breezeway and through both glass walls of the library to the garden beyond. "I like the transparency. It shows somehow that this building belongs to poetry."
Transparency is not evident streetside.
The west wall has a single small window, sited there, said Wallach, because his computer told him it would be shielded from afternoon sun by the tall Aleppo pines across the street.
The east window wall is shielded by the concrete block "binary wall," encoded with a line of Richard Shelton's poetry, which lost 8 feet of elevation to budget reality. Wallach added white shades to the windows to temporarily deflect glare while he waits for the giant timber bamboo planted in the meditation garden to create a green barrier to the rising sun.
It is not a large building by university standards, but in the world of the poet it is huge.
Matthew John Conley, a poet and grad student at the UA, said he chose to apply at the university because of its highly regarded creative-writing program and because it had a Poetry Center — a rarity. Then he saw the new building and volunteered to work there in addition to his studies and teaching duties.
"Nobody has this," he said.
● Contact reporter Tom Beal at 573-4158 or tbeal@azstarnet.com.
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