Suburban oasis: This new community centre in a suburb of Phoenix rejuvenates an existing park.

Typical of the booming American suburbs that emerged after the Second World War, Maryvale, on the west edge of Phoenix, was one of the USA's first postwar masterplanned communities. Along with Levittown in New York, it had a profound impact on urban planning, setting, for better or worse, the pattern for homogenous suburban development across the US. Maryvale dates from the late 1950s and, like many older inner-ring suburbs, is now suffering signs of decline as suburban growth (and wealth) move ever outwards. Its population is now a diverse mixture of immigrant families, attracted to the area by lower housing and living costs.

Social and economic shifts notwithstanding, Maryvale has survived the passage of time, and most of its public buildings are still in use today. The urban plan was structured around a generously scaled park, equipped with a library and community centre, and outdoor swimming pool, baseball diamond, basketball and volleyball courts, children's playground and a ramada, a traditional shaded arbour or breezeway characteristic of the American Southwest.

Though this civic-minded provision speaks of lives energetically lived outdoors, the high desert, Arizonan climate is as harshly intense as that of the Arabian peninsula. Phoenix has the distinction of being the hottest city in the US, and few could endure its dry, scorching summers before the merciful advent of air conditioning. Yet Arizona's landscape, light and sense of possibilities have historically attracted artists (from Georgia O'Keeffe to James Turrell), and, more recently, a now familiar cabal of incomer architects that includes Will Bruder, Rick Joy, Wendell Burnette and Marwan Al-Sayed. In this extreme terrain, creative endeavour is endowed with a new and otherworldly context that continues to provide a crucial spur to the current generation of Southwestern regionalists.

Here, Wendell Burnette has collaborated with Gould Evans, another Phoenix-based practice (and designers of the Stevie Eller Dance Theatre at the University of Arizona, AR February 2004), to reinvigorate Maryvale's civic core. The brief was to replace the existing library and community centre with a new, larger mixed-use structure that would reconsider its relationship with both the park and wider surroundings. The client, the Phoenix municipality, also wanted some publicly obvious manifestation of this important civic mission.

The new complex manifests a mind/body duality, with a library for cerebral contemplation and a sports hall for physical recreation which augments the existing provision of park and pool. Two equally proportioned, crisply pristine boxes house the library collection and the sports hall, which also incorporates a running track and lounge spaces for teenagers and the elderly. Each box is a clear span, columnfree space, top and bottom-lit to admit a generous amount of daylight. At the base of each volume a broad band of clear glazing creates a vitrine-like effect, so that the function and character of each building can be immediately apprehended through these continuously animated shop windows. Democratic and welcoming, the buildings thus become an integral part of the public realm.

Even when working in the city, Burnette and his collaborators intuitively synthesise the influences of the desert landscape with a familiar reductivist language of orthogonal geometries and limited palette of materials intended to temper the effects of climate. Street-facing facades are clad in a ventilated skin of stainless-steel panels that reflects heat, as well as constantly and subtly changing with light conditions. For the 'shop windows', external louvres control direct solar gain along the glazed perimeter. On the (west) sports field side of the complex, by contrast, the volumes read as a series of thermally massive solid masonry forms, that pick up and acknowledge the architectural language of the existing pool house.

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Extensive natural shade is also provided in the form of planting. Uniform groves of palo verde trees in the parking lots screen the buildings and reduce the heat island effect caused by the sun blaring down on exposed asphalt. Appropriately, the complex is named after the famously hardy desert tree that flourishes in the most arid, unforgiving conditions. A pedestrian promenade of Arizona ash also threads together the park, buildings and parking lots along an east-west axis. The walking surface of this route incorporates a historical tableau of Maryvale and its pioneering planner, John F. Long.

Interiors are convivial, luminous spaces, lined with robust, economical materials, such as cork for the floors in the library and recycled rubber tree wood for the floors in the sports hall. Tinges of bold primary colours in furniture and fittings add visual dynamism. Much of the success of the internal organisation lies in the way it cultivates a sociable sense of being aware of other things going on around you; of library users catching glimpses of people being sportif and vice versa. With over 5000 visitors daily, this is clearly a popular new complex, a suburban oasis capable of stimulating both mind and body, as well making a wider contribution to urban wellbeing.

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