Saguaro Land: Jones Studio's architecture is inspired by the Sonoran Desert

Saguaro Land is a series from The Show looking at the Sonoran Desert — the lushest, hottest desert in the world that happens to be our home.

Brian Farling is one of the principals at Jones Studio, an architecture firm in Tempe that's made a name for itself as the place to go for modern, sustainable design inspired by the Sonoran Desert. 

Lauren GIlger/KJZZ

The studio was founded in 1979 by Eddie Jones. He followed Frank Lloyd Wright and Paolo Soleri to the desert in search of the Sonoran landscape they prized. He was joined by his brother Niel a few years later and they grew from there. 

Farling joined them straight out of school in 1998. A kid who grew up in Pennsylvania, he’d visited a cousin at the University of Arizona and fell in love with the desert. 

Full conversation

BRIAN FARLING: The sun here is sort of very unique. And you could say that about anywhere. But here, you know, we have like 85% of the days are full of sun. And so if you have, if you're living in a space, that amount of light and the quality of that light really just sort of affects your environment.

It affects your everyday sort of everything that you do. You know, this space that we're sitting in right now, this conference room with the courtyard next to it, I just think it's a great example of connecting to that light because you have that consistency of the light, but it's also brutal.

So you have to be very careful and very deliberate with when buildings protect spaces from light and then when they open up to it. So here we're opened up to the north with a tree and the light is just dappled and beautiful and not direct ambient and fills up this room. But we have the protected walls on the west and the south, you know, sort of keeping the damaging, the more brutal aspects of the sun in check.

LAUREN GILGER: So you're thinking about the light a lot, not just in how it, heats us all summer and kills us, but also in the ways that it's beautiful. There's A double-edged sword there.

FARLING: Yeah, the quality of light here is just remarkable. I mean, you know, if you travel, you rarely get to experience blue sky as much as you do here. And as long as you're protected from The oven that we all know summer to be here, I find it invigorating. It's just like fills me with happiness.

GILGER: So the sun, obviously in the light here, first thing, right, when you think about architecture and how to build for this place, what else comes to mind for you?

FARLING: Water. This firm is very much obsessed with water in the desert and how we as architects can reinforce the fact that it's so precious and we have to be this amazing stewards. I'm very much obsessed with water and I feel like here, unlike most larger cities, or really most settlements across the earth, you're usually adjacent to a body of water.

Think about the cities, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, cities in Europe. There's usually a river or a lake or an ocean. Here, we're sort of out in the middle, of this beautiful desert disconnected to our water.

I feel like, that level of connectedness with our water is something that we have to do, just like those other cities are connected to their lakes and rivers and have that sort of, very visceral, immediate connection with how much water they have and where it comes from.

GILGER: So when you're designing for that, for that appreciation of water and sort of recognizing that disconnection, what does that look like?

FARLING: So it can look like a lot of things. There's a lot of history of Indigenous people being just very smart with capturing water. So it can be deliberate like that where water comes off the roof into a barrel and you collect it. But it can also be experiential.

So there's a project, the Mariposa Land Port of Entry, is sort of the extreme example of capturing water. So we have a million gallon water harvesting system that irrigates the 54 acre site.

GILGER: And that's, this is if we should explain, a port of entry to the US from Mexico and down on the border?

FARLING: Right. The General Services Administration is a project, very high aspirations for making very important and porphyritic texture, a welcoming gesture, believe it or not, a welcoming gesture to people coming across the border. So the design was focused around this idea of what does that gesture look like and how do you make it meaningful and dignified?

So we thought if we make an oasis, if you enter into a desert oasis, a garden, that's a very human thing and a very powerful way to greet people and for their experience and for all the people that are working there. So how do you do a garden in the desert? How do you do an oasis in the desert? You have some kind of water source. And hopefully it's not connected to the city plumbing system.

So every building down there and lots of the parking areas and roadways drain to specific collection points. and there's some sort of very deliberate sculptural water scupper that celebrates when it rains and reminds everybody there that water is precious and that it's feeding the garden that everybody is enjoying on this port of entry.

GILGER: So you're gathering the water that comes down. This is not water features in the sense of like we're going to put a fountain here. It's natural water?

FARLING: It is natural water, but certainly fountains like you think of in Las Vegas and just very sort of over the top fountains are one thing, but as just in this courtyard right out here.

GILGER: Yeah, there's one right outside here.

FARLING: We have a little dribbling fountain that sound of water as you enter, and as you experience that space, at Mariposa, we actually keep the water that's in the tank clean by aerating it through some small fountains that are in this gathering courtyard. So that sound, I mean, we all know that sound. It's a very human sound and everybody loves it.

GILGER: So that's really interesting because I would have never thought of architecture and thought of sound, right? And thought of like that sort of aspect of the senses. It sounds like you're really working with all five senses here.

FARLING: We try to, yeah. I mean, I think aspirationally, I think all architecture, the entire built environment in the Colorado River watershed, Southwest, should be reminding everybody that lives here how precious water is all the time. And those are moments, those are moments to define what desert architecture is.

Because, you know, because if the architecture is formed and shaped and deliberate with the way it's dealing with water, that's something that's extremely unique to this place. And so that is a definite, I think that's a definition of, or sort of a ground rule for, you know, doing desert design.

GILGER: And this space in particular, like this office that we're sitting in here, is obviously designed in this way. Do you want to go take a look?

FARLING: Yeah, sure.

GILGER: We made our way into the main office, a long, narrow room with a folded angular ceiling. And I was introduced to the firm's founder, Eddie Jones. Hi. Nice to meet you.

What is the thought behind this ceiling? It's sort of, it's got an interesting sort of pattern to it.

EDDIE JONES: It's structural. You see that unusual block wall outside? Well, it's structurally unstable. So the steel tube on top connects to the steel forks, which connect back to the building column line that you see here, and then that these folds in the ceiling kick all the lateral forces back to the center of the building. Now it's obvious.

GILGER: It seems clear now, yes, but it's beautifully done, and there's such a use of light there too, right?

JONES: Yeah, well, we prefer colored light over paint, because colored light will dissipate the color as opposed to a sharp paint line. And when you talk about desert architecture, people immediately think about how to, passively cool and perhaps even harvest rainwater. Maybe Brian talked about that. But, we always have sunshine. And so putting a building in a garden is perhaps easier here than it would be up in a northern climate. And the other quality of the desert is the light. We're always guaranteed light, so we put it to work.

FARLING: In the winter, this folded ceiling, there's a clerestory strip of glass up high on the south. The light comes in, and this red floor is up on the mezzanine as well. The light comes in and bounces, and we always have this pink ceiling in the winter, and it starts to go away this time of the year because the sun's much higher, you know, in the sky.

JONES: It's inspiring to work in this building. Generally speaking, it's inspiring to work in architecture. And that's why we try to create architecture for all of our clients and all of the users that are going to be impacted by our buildings. You know, everybody deserves to be inspired, right?

GILGER: That was my conversation with Eddie Jones and Brian Farling of Jones Studio. You want to see that building that we're describing there, right? Well, for photos and more from our Saguaro Land series, head to our website, theshow.kjzz.org.