Bear Down Gym, Then and Now
A look inside a transformative case of adaptive reuse.
Photo: Courtesy Arizona Daily Star
Photo: Special Collections, the University of Arizona
Buildings, like people, go through phases: the vacant schoolhouse turned affordable housing in a rebounding downtown, the old post office incorporated into the modern train station next door. When architect Corky Poster of Tucson firm Poster Mirto McDonald took on the job of rehabilitating Bear Down Gym in 2013, it was effectively a cubicle farm: its basketball court covered in carpet squares, its windows plugged up by duct work. “It looked awful,” Poster says.
It was also, he adds, absolutely correct. “When you put a big hole in the wall in order to get [ducts] in, it might look better, but now you have a big hole in the wall,” he says. “You’ve damaged the historic resource.” In Bear Down’s case, you could pick up the carpet squares with your hands and still see the court underneath — ugly changes, but reversible ones.
Photo: Special Collections, the University of Arizona
Poster, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the University of Arizona College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture who has worked in historic preservation in Tucson for more than 50 years, compares the project (and others like it) to a person in intensive care. “Your body is lying in the bed, and it’s you, and there’s all this other stuff going in and out of orifices, but it’s keeping you alive. And when you’re better, all those things get removed and you’re still the one in the bed.”
The Bear Down Gym you walk into today is, in part, the Bear Down students walked into a hundred years ago, whether to register for classes or watch basketball or go to a dance (and there were, it seems, many, many dances). “Everything in that first section is nostalgia,” Poster says. “So, Joe Alumni from the class of ’57 can walk in and say, ‘Wow, I remember how cool this was.’” Beyond it is something new: a three-story steel structure that combines offices, study areas and student support spaces, a satellite Campus Recreation Center, and the campus’s first interfaith reflection room.
Importantly, while Bear Down used to exclusively face north, toward the Mall, it now also opens south, to the new Bartlett Academic Success Center and the Student Success District, creating a conversation between old and new space in a part of campus that had always been pretty well trafficked but felt infrastructurally neglected.
The district, the whole of which was co-designed by Poster Mirto McDonald with Miller-Hull and has received multiple awards including one from the American Institute of Architects, also includes interventions like new exits and openings on the western side of the Main Library and the eastern alley of the Science and Engineering Library, framed by a previously blank brick wall that Poster called “the ugliest single space on the university campus.”
Jessica Bassi ’20 ’23, the U of A’s historic preservation coordinator, says the tension between progress and tradition is what makes preservation complex. “Not every older building can — or should — be preserved,” she says. “What matters is evaluating a building’s historical significance alongside its functionality. If the university determines that constructing a new facility would better support its mission than preserving an existing one, that’s a reasonable and justifiable decision.”
Bassi happens to also be the university’s real estate manager. “I wanted to be able to bring a knowledge of real estate and development — responsible real estate development — and the historic fabric of the university together,” she says. “[Campus] is the perfect living laboratory for that.”
Bear Down Gym 2026
It’s a useful metaphor, the living laboratory. Poster describes the difference between preservation, restoration and rehabilitation like this: Preservation is essentially highly sensitive maintenance work, fixing what needs to be fixed and keeping things pristine. Restoration is taking an altered building back to what it once was, as Poster and his colleagues did with the train depot in downtown Tucson. Rehabilitation, which is also called adaptive reuse, means respecting the exterior of a building while adapting its interior to modern use — giving an old structure a previously unimaginable new life.
Bear Down isn’t what it was — that’s as true for alums who lived through the ugly ductwork era as it is for those who caught the last men’s basketball game there back in early 1973, or the members of the shooting team who once practiced on the rifle range in the basement, or the students who swam in the pool out back. (That space is now a beautiful court between Bear Down and Bartlett.) It can be easy to forget that something so solid (the brick, the steel) is ultimately temporary, and strange to realize that it’s our feelings about those temporary, changing places that hold up longest.
