On the afternoon of Thursday, Jan. 12, a stereotypical, 62-degree sunny Sedona winter day, architects Dan Jensvold and Stephen Thompson walked back onto the grounds of the Sedona Cultural Park.

From 1993 until the park opened in 2000, Jensvold and Thompson guided its development from a piece of National Forest land with a trash compactor into a nationally-renowned performing arts venue, creating what the park’s former executive director Daniel Schay called “the most carefully designed project in Sedona’s history.”

“We took it upon ourselves to embody Sedona in the site,” Thompson said. “We chained ourselves to a lot of those trees.” There are about 20,000 trees on the Cultural Park property. Jensvold and Thompson know. They counted them.

Almost all of those trees are still in place, and more. At the center of the amphitheater that faces the Georgia Frontiere Performing Arts Pavilion stand two piñons the architects brought from New Mexico. Untended for 20 years, they have not only survived but thrived in an environment that never stopped being a high desert forest. Now their tips have reached the upper terrace. Elsewhere, an uninvited juniper has made itself at home on one of the aisles.

The amphitheater has been treated better by weather and time than it has by humans. Thompson pointed out where fixtures and cabling had been torn out with a bulldozer by the former owner’s work crews. Jensvold lifted up a partlydismounted light fixture for inspection.

“They even took the light bulbs,” he said.

Innovative Construction

At the very beginning of the era when dark-sky lighting was becoming a priority for Sedona, Jensvold and Thompson had already installed dark-sky fixtures at the Cultural Park. Thirty years ago, they had few commercial options for such fixtures available to choose from, so they invented their own, using miniature spotlights and reflectors in combination to produce a diffuse, shielded light.

More than a hundred of these lights previously helped visitors find their way around the park. Today, all of them have been removed, but a few still remain in the parking lot of the adjoining Yavapai College Sedona Center.

Standing on the amphitheater’s topmost terrace, which had previously been illuminated by those lights, the two architects reminisced about the picnic tables they had created for the terrace, where visitors were able to enjoy refreshments during the performances. Nothing but the foundations of the snack bar remain today.

Frontiere Pavilion

The pavilion’s recognizable triple arches, which were inspired by the forms of indigenous Southwestern architecture, are laminated, pressure-treated wood beams engineered by Western Wood Structures, of Tualatin, Ore. WWS is known for its wooden bridge designs as well as for such projects as the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Ore., at the time of its construction the world’s largest wooden dome, and the Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, Calif.

Except for an occasional splinter, the beams are in the same condition as they were when installed. The galvanized joints holding the structure together show less rust after almost a quarter of a century than a piece of rebar would after being left outside in wet weather for a couple of weeks.

“The arches and steelwork appear to be in very good shape,” Jensvold said, looking up at the roof structure. He pointed out where certain boards could be replaced due to water leakage, but noted that there was comparatively little damage given the lack of maintenance for two decades.

Existing water damage to the pavilion is mostly limited to the stage floor. The architects observed that the current floor is plywood that was laid quickly in order to get the amphitheater operational, rather than the finished sprung floor that they designed. The entire concrete structure to accommodate the installation of a dance floor remains intact beneath the warped plywood today’s visitors see.

Acoustics

The most important detail of the amphitheater’s engineering, however, is invisible; it only becomes evident when standing on the pavilion stage. A single voice from the stage can be heard clearly by everyone in all 5,350 seats.

While the amphitheater was equipped with electronic amplifiers during its original three years of operation, the true ingenuity of its design lies in the fact that it does not need them. The amphitheater is itself a natural, passive amplifier that continues the tradition of Greco-Roman sonic engineering into the 21st century.

In front of the stage is an orchestra pit with room for 70 musicians. Jensvold recalled that they designed the amphitheater in part as the summer home for the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, which performed the park’s opening concert on May 26, 2000.

The restroom building to one side of the pavilion, which looks blocky and out of place by comparison, was not part of the pavilion setup as designed. Jensvold and Thompson explained that it was added later by “a bathroom expert from Illinois” whom the park’s operators hired. Their plan for the site’s restrooms called for them to be excavated into the hillside and terraces of the amphitheater, entirely out of sight.

Grander Site Plans

Although the Frontiere Pavilion is the visual image most commonly associated with the Cultural Park, the original master plan for the site, dated Feb. 21, 1995, shows that the architects and organizers had a great deal more in mind.

In subsequent years, the Cultural Park would also have gained a secondary, smaller amphitheater for more intimate performances, an indoor performing arts center, an exhibition building meant to house museums and festivals, a U.S. Forest Service interpretive center, government offices and an arts village.

Almost all of the parking areas and roads throughout the Cultural Park were left unpaved due to a combination of the need to minimize costs and a desire to avoid adding to Sedona’s nearly 500 acres of paved roads.

After 20 years with little or no maintenance, most of those roads remain in good condition and driveable by an ordinary vehicle. When doing the grading, Jensvold and Thompson actually set up a crusher on site to reprocess the excavated rock from the amphitheater into gravel for surfacing the roads and brought very little new material into the park.

Parking

The master plan for the Cultural Park specified 925 car parking spaces and eight bus parking spaces. The architects rejected the idea of concentrating these in a massive lot and scattered them throughout the site among the trees, as they would be found in a state park or a Forest Service campground. The apparent absence of parking for such a huge facility is the second ingenious aspect of the park’s original layout. Although it has more parking than any other facility in the city, the Cultural Park appears to have almost no parking at all.

The dispersed parking areas were interconnected by a network of trails that wound through the centuries-old trees formerly part of the Coconino National Forest. Along these paths stood sculptures and other works of art, effectively transforming the entire Cultural Park into a sculpture park and a nature walk. A planned pedestrian overpass across SR 89A at the intersection with Upper Red Rock Loop road would have linked up the National Forest trail networks north and south of the highway, facilitating hiking.

“This was our parking space,” Jensvold chuckled as they passed a graveled area that had been the VIP parking lot. He pointed to the parking spot closest to the pavilion. “And that was Georgia Frontiere’s.”

Central Point

Atop a ridge toward the rear of the park is a location that Jensvold and Thompson designated on the plan as “Central Point,” the point at which the centerlines of all the major planned facilities intersected. As designed, it would have featured a 50-foot observation tower rising from an interpretive terrace like the gnomon of a sundial. Today, a pile of concrete rubble occupies the location once planned for the observation tower.

Looking across the Cultural Park from Central Point, a third subtle but significant feature of the original master plan becomes apparent. Due to the contours of the site, all of the planned buildings, had they been constructed, would have been largely invisible from the ridge and entirely invisible from one another, hidden behind trees and hillsides. Structures placed anywhere else would be much more obvious. When creating the master plan, Jensvold and Thompson did not choose building sites based on engineering convenience. Instead, they allowed the structure of the land itself to dictate the placement of the facilities.

Currently, the most significant visual feature noticeable from the ridge is the Sedona Performing Arts Center, the slab-like walls of which catch the eye long before a viewer notices the subdued arches of the Frontiere Pavilion.

At the Forest Service trailhead, one of the original ramadas Jensvold and Thompson designed is still in place, and beneath it are what appear to be the last two picnic tables they created for the park, massive pieces of furniture made of steel and wood beams. Thompson joked he should save one of the tables and take it back with him, so the two architects tried to pick it up at one end. They could barely get it off the ground. Laughing, Jensvold said they’d need 10 men to do it.

Sedona Center

Back at the Yavapai College parking lot, Jensvold took a closer look at the Sedona Center, which he and his partner had designed to become the future Sedona City Hall. The wings of the building, as first built, were joined by an open-air rotunda surrounding a fountain and sculpture.

Later, the community college enclosed the rotunda, turning it into a lobby, tore out the artwork and topped it off with a roof that Jensvold referred to as a “dunce cap.”

Arts Village

Adjoining the Sedona Center and SR 89A is the portion of the park that Jensvold and Thompson had intended for development as an arts village. The village would have featured low, European-style twostory buildings dotted among the trees and loosely organized around a pair of plazas. These buildings would have housed shops, galleries, studios, cafes and arts education programs on their first floors and apartments for artists on their second floors.

Jensvold estimated that an artists’ village on this part of the site could be designed to include a couple of hundred housing units. In the original master plan, it would also have featured an elder hostel. Thompson described it as “a pure European atelier concept.”

According to Jensvold and Thompson, the construction costs for those portions of the Cultural Park that were completed were in the neighborhood of $3 million, with about $1 million of that having been invested in underground conduit, electrical and engineering work and another $800,000 spent on grading. They estimated the cost of constructing a comparable facility today at between $30 million and $40 million.

Even after 20 years of neglect and outright vandalism, the Cultural Park’s hidden buildings, discreet parking, preservation of trees and landscape, subordination of design to the environment, incorporation of indigenous forms and use of natural amplification still illustrate the possibilities inherent in the marriage of modern architecture with genuine environmental concern. All the principles that the city is attempting to advocate and enforce through its building codes were demonstrated early, skillfully — and voluntarily — by Jensvold and Thompson in creating the master plan for the site.

“The whole place is in great condition, apart from 20 years’ deferred maintenance,” Jensvold said.

The Sedona City Council recently purchased the parcels for an estimated $24 million. The city has no formal plans for what to do with the site and its existing buildings.