Haute Houses

It's not, and Leesa Stuck is living proof. She lives in a $1.5-million home with two full-size air conditioning units, one at either end, and she can't get her home below 80 degrees in July. She runs the dishwasher and washing machine at night because it's cheaper; she's trying to trim her $700-a-month summer electricity bills.

She doesn't like to tell people the name of the (largely unknown) architect or the very high-profile builders who built her home, because she doesn't blame them. She blames herself, and sometimes her boyfriend, because until three years ago they'd lived their whole lives in suburban Minneapolis and didn't know that a house with two 10-foot windows in front would be so hard to keep cool.

"I guess we just thought things like heating and cooling were all taken into consideration by the people who built the house," she says, rolling her eyes. "What did we know?" It's this "what did we know?" mentality that's really behind the row of glass boxes marching across our horizon. "Modern architecture is going to continue to be popular with builders because it's built on less expensive materials," says Valley architect and designer Jack Black. "The problem is that there's no consistency. We have some very talented architects, and also some really stupid ones who don't keep an eye on site planning and other things that help create a good urban infrastructure. They're relying on ill-informed clients who will make huge decisions based on very capricious things."

Black cites our city's most infamous example, the 12-story, 550,000-square-foot Sandra Day O'Connor United States Courthouse on Washington Street. Designed by award-winning New York-based architect Richard Meier and dedicated just three years ago, the courthouse was initially plagued with climate-control problems and atrium temperatures that soared above 100 degrees in the summer, thanks to an ineffective evaporative cooling system. The building's press liaison, Richard Weare, swears that the building's hot-as-balls past is behind it; that its cooling problems were rectified, not long after the building opened, with just a couple of simple tweaks to its existing system. (In fact, workers and visitors alike on a recent 108-degree afternoon seemed perfectly comfortable in the building's cool atrium and lobby offices.) But the damage to the courthouse's reputation has been done, and it comes up in conversations about bad structural planning almost as often as what people around here tend to call "the Lisa Sette House," but which its architect, Baghdad-born Marwan al-Sayed, dubbed "The House of Earth and Light."

Al-Sayed's house has become a local legend, although not so much for its environmentally sound materials or its cunning design as for its infamous heat-generating roof. The home, which has been written about in architecture magazines around the globe, features 18-inch-thick walls made of a mix of custom concrete and earth from the site that insulate the house from heat. But for some reason, on top of these heat-expelling walls, al-Sayed plopped a roof made almost entirely of stretched canvas.

"Imagine what it would be like to live in a tent in the desert in the middle of summer," says Peter Shikany, who bought the house three years ago with his partner, Scottsdale gallery owner Lisa Sette. "Our house was hot."

"Ah, the Great Glass Box with the Canvas Roof story," Bryan chuckles sadly. "What a tragedy! But not because these people who built it wanted to live in an art piece, a concrete box with a tent roof. And not because the architect convinced them it would work because people in the desert have been living in tents for centuries, which was foolish. No. The real tragedy is that all the strife led to the breakup of the owners' marriage. You can re-roof a house, but not a relationship."

After purchasing the home from the divorced couple, Shikany and Sette installed a more conventional roof of insulated steel and Sheetrock, but not before their home gained national attention, thanks in part to a story in Dwell magazine detailing how the original owners, who built the home themselves, agreed to al-Sayed's failed "experimental" roof.

"And he's one of the darlings of the architecture scene!" Bryan brays about al-Sayed. "If a doctor messed up like that, he wouldn't be allowed to practice!"

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Will Bruder says metal and glass houses in the desert aren't a problem; they're an energy-conscious solution. Bruder, one of the Southwest's most celebrated architects and a student of arcology master and Arcosanti founder Paolo Soleri, lives in one of his own designs: the Loloma 5, a massive glass box on Marshall Way in Scottsdale facing Camelback Mountain. It's a building that Bruder says debunks any claims that shiny metal and wide views of the desert always mean a hot house and a scary electricity bill.