City of Scottsdale Reata Sports Complex Operations Building

The City of Scottsdale Reata Sports Complex offers multi-use playing fields supporting a variety of sports and tournament play including soccer, lacrosse, football, and rugby. A landscape and civil engineering led team hired the architectural team to design the Operations Building which primarily provides 10 single-occupant restroom stalls with outdoor handwashing stations with a modestly sized Parks & Recreation staff office.

The design contextually synthesizes a varied context: the roof form vernacular of adjacent facilities within the WestWorld of Scottsdale, the City’s premier equestrian facility; the scale of the adjacent residential neighborhood; the patina of nearby city public facilities rendered in weathered steel; and the McDowell Mountains. Calculated strategies elevate user experience and calibrate the building with the nuances of site. Corner windows of the staff office permit wide views of the playing fields and public areas for passive surveillance. Restrooms are shaded from intense sunlight while offering modesty screening to its stalls.

Breezes are harnessed through semi-enclosed covered walkways. Apertures in the vertical planes of perforated steel provide passage of both people, equipment, and sight lines. One corrugated profile of weathering A606 steel lightly wraps a steel frame armature and masonry beneath. This project strives to demonstrate that simplicity and restraint can occupy a poetic place even among the most seemingly mundane of building types.