Phoenix Union High School Exterior Rehabilitation, Phoenix

For over a decade, the citizens of Phoenix watched their first high school, listed on the National Register in 1982, first suffer neglect and then slowly succumb to the wreaking ball. In the end, only three Neoclassical Revival Style buildings remained. Then the former high school campus became the Biomedical Campus for the City of Phoenix with the Translational Genomics Research Institute (T-GEN) opening in December 2004. The fate of the three historic high school buildings was uncertain until the University of Arizona College of Medicine approached the City with the hope of making the historic buildings their Phoenix headquarters. These buildings are now the centerpiece to a modern high tech campus and show that the two goals of adaptive reuse and careful rehabilitation of key character defining elements can be met.