Design Icon – Project

The corner of Rural Road and University Boulevard on ASU’s Tempe campus was a prominent location, but blighted with an old repair shop that hid the complexity of the site and its history, which included old canals and Hohokam networks buried deep beneath the earth. Site utilities and transportation were early Tempe relics. It became an urban island next to the light rail and a canal. It is complex. ASU President Michael Crow wanted to create a new vision for the site, which resulted in the Walton Center for Planetary Health, a public face for groundbreaking research at the university. An architectural team, headed by Rachel Green Rasmussen, AIA, of Tempe-based Architekton, worked with Grimshaw Architects to secure the project and do programming and design. Five years later, the project is an award-winning design and an architectural vessel to showcase research from the origins of man to the sustainability of our entire world.