Wendell Burnette’s eleven-year association (1985-1996) with the studio of William Bruder culminated in a six-year design collaboration on the landmark $28M Burton Barr Phoenix Central Library as co-designer, project architect and field architect. The library is conceived as a Mesa Landform, an abstraction of the mythical southwest landscape housing a one million volume collection within its 280,000SF. The ‘top of the Mesa’ is a given over to the citizens of the city as the largest reading room in North America. It is widely cited as an early touchstone of “green” environmental design before LEED was established by the U.S. Green Building Council and this was recently confirmed with a LEED – EB (Existing Building) Silver 2.0 rating in 2011.