The Colorado River has been in sustained drought for more than twenty years. Its average flow has declined nearly 20% since 2000. Arizona is currently facing an 18% reduction in its Colorado River allocation. The guidelines that govern the river’s allocation among seven states are being renegotiated, and the outcome will shape the future of water in the American Southwest for decades.

These are not abstract concerns for a developer building in North Scottsdale. They are the conditions on the ground, and they are the conditions Optima McDowell Mountain was designed to address.

The Numbers

At the lower level of the 22-acre site, an underground concrete vault is designed to capture and store approximately 210,000 gallons of rainwater. That system, the largest private rainwater harvesting system in the United States, collects stormwater that falls on the site and repurposes it for on-site irrigation, removing all irrigation demand from Scottsdale’s municipal supply.

The result: residences at Optima McDowell Mountain are designed to use half as much water as the average Scottsdale multifamily residence, and a quarter as much as the average Scottsdale single-family home. In a city actively managing for a future with less water, that is not a marginal improvement. It is a different order of magnitude.

Beyond the rainwater system, Optima has secured 2,750 acre-feet of water through a partnership with the City of Scottsdale, equivalent to more than 30 years of full residential and commercial occupancy, deposited directly into Scottsdale’s water system to support the city’s long-term supply.

The Building Systems

Water conservation at Optima McDowell Mountain is embedded in the architecture, not layered onto it. The vertical landscaping system allows drought-resistant plants to cascade down the facades of all six buildings. Providing natural insulation and reducing the urban heat island effect that drives additional cooling demand. Xeriscape landscaping, drip irrigation, and native plantings across 75% of the site reduce water requirements while creating a landscape genuinely suited to the Sonoran Desert.

Optima McDowell Mountain is the first development in Arizona built under both the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), providing an additional 9% energy savings over the previous code, and the International Green Construction Code (IgCC). Solar panels, high-performance VRF heating and cooling systems, induction cooktops in every residence, 100% underground parking, and EV charging complete a sustainability program that David Hovey Jr. has described as the culmination of everything Optima has worked toward over four decades.

What It Means

The question facing developers in the American Southwest is no longer whether to take water seriously. That conversation is over. The question is how seriously, and at what scale. Optima McDowell Mountain provides one answer: seriously enough to install the largest private rainwater harvesting system in the country, and to design every building system, from the facades to the mechanical plant to the vertical gardens, around the imperative of using less.

Experience a different standard of desert living. Schedule a tour at Optima McDowell Mountain today.

There is a moment that happens to almost every new resident of an Optima community. They take the elevator to the top for the first time, step out onto the sky deck, and stop. Not because they weren’t expecting something good, they were. But because what’s actually there exceeds what they imagined was possible from the roof of a residential building.

That reaction isn’t accidental. It’s the result of a design philosophy that has treated the sky deck not as a finishing touch, but as one of the most important spaces in the entire community.

A Design Decision, Not an Amenity Package

At Optima, the rooftop is designed with the same intentionality as any residence. Every sky deck begins with a fundamental question: what does the specific setting of this building demand, and how do we build something that honors it? The answer at each community is different, shaped by the landscape, the climate, the views, and the particular character of the neighborhood below. The result is that no two Optima sky decks are alike. They share a standard, but not a template.

David Hovey Jr. has described how the sky decks have evolved over time in direct response to how residents live, with bigger pools, more shaded gathering areas, yoga studios with open sliding glass walls, saunas and cold plunges, outdoor theaters, and the quarter-mile running track that made its debut at Optima Kierland. Each iteration built on the last. Each one asked: what would make this better?

Optima Kierland: A Sky Deck for Every Tower

At Optima Kierland, the sky deck isn’t a shared amenity, it’s a private one. Each of the five towers has its own dedicated sky deck, exclusive to that tower’s residents. It’s a design decision that transforms a rooftop from a communal convenience into something that genuinely feels like yours.

The 7190 tower’s sky deck is the most recent evolution: an Olympic-length heated pool, a quarter-mile running track that follows the perimeter of the roof, a spa and cold plunge, lounge seating, fire pits, an outdoor bar and kitchen with TVs, and the most breathtaking unobstructed views of the McDowell Mountains in North Scottsdale. In the earlier towers, glass-enclosed saunas, heated lap pools, yoga studios, outdoor theaters, and rooftop gardens round out sky decks that have set the standard for what rooftop living in the desert can be. Arizona’s first rooftop running track was born here, because the architects who designed the buildings also designed the life that happens on top of them.

Optima McDowell Mountain: Six Decks, Six Panoramas

At Optima McDowell Mountain, every one of the six buildings will have its own rooftop sky deck, each one will offer a 50-meter Olympic-length pool, a running track that follows the building’s perimeter, outdoor fire pits, lounge seating, arbors covered in vines, and outdoor kitchens with barbecues and dining spaces. The views rotate with the desert compass: the McDowell Mountains to the east, Camelback Mountain to the south, Pinnacle Peak to the north, and sunsets to the west that light the sky in every shade of amber, rose, and gold. No seat on any of these rooftops offers the same view twice.

Optima Lakeview: Chicago, Unobstructed

In Chicago, the sky deck takes on an entirely different character. At Optima Lakeview, the rooftop sky deck places residents above the Lakeview neighborhood with panoramic views that sweep from the lakefront to Wrigley Field, a cityscape that is one of the most extraordinary in the country. The heated pool is designed for year-round use, a deliberate choice that ensures the deck never closes regardless of what a Chicago winter decides to do. Fire pits, lounge seating, a glass-enclosed party room, an outdoor theater, and barbecue areas ensure that whether the evening calls for a quiet drink above the city or a gathering of neighbors, the space is ready.

Optima Signature: Elevated Living Across Four Amenity Levels

At Optima Signature, the experience is different, and intentionally so. Rather than a single rooftop sky deck, Optima Signature distributes its amenity spaces across four floors, giving residents multiple ways to engage with the city depending on the hour and the occasion. The heated indoor and outdoor pools sit within an amenity experience that spans 1.5 acres and includes a 40-yard indoor running track, multiple spas, indoor and outdoor saunas, and men’s and women’s locker rooms with steam rooms, as well as a Level 20 library and residents’ lounge with views of the lake and the skyline, and the exclusive Club 52 sky terrace for Apex residents. From 57 stories above Streeterville, Lake Michigan stretches unbroken to the east, the Chicago River winds through the city to the south, and the skyline fills every other direction. The result is not one elevated moment but a building-wide experience of height and light and city, one that changes with every season, every floor, and every time of day.

Optima Verdana: The North Shore, Elevated

At Optima Verdana, the sky deck takes its cue from the particular quality of North Shore light and the intimate scale of Wilmette’s village character. The glass-enclosed heated lap pool with retractable walls opens to fresh outdoor air when the season allows, year-round swimming in a setting that frames sweeping views of the Wilmette treetop canopy and the Bahá’í Temple to the north. A sun deck, barbecues, herb gardens, a bocce court, fire pits, and a party room with a chef’s kitchen make the rooftop at Verdana a space that reflects both the ambition and the quieter, more considered pace of North Shore living.

Optima Sonoran Village: A Desert Oasis, Ground to Rooftop

At Optima Sonoran Village, the elevated outdoor experience is distributed across the community rather than concentrated at a single point. Tower 15, the community’s most recent tower, offers its residents an exclusive rooftop sky deck with views of Camelback Mountain, an outdoor kitchen, fire pits, a spa, and a sun deck scaled for intimacy rather than spectacle.

For the broader community, the outdoor life unfolds across 6.1 acres of lushly landscaped grounds: two resort-style pool areas with spas, saunas, outdoor kitchens, fire pits, and lounge seating under the Scottsdale sky. The glass-enclosed 19,000-square-foot fitness center overlooks the lap pool, dissolving the boundary between inside and out even in the middle of a workout. A sculpture garden of five original David Hovey Sr. works in natural Cor-Ten steel, a putting green, and courtyard walking paths complete an outdoor experience designed to make the desert feel like an amenity, one that rewards every hour of the day differently, from the blue cool of early morning to the amber light of an Arizona evening.

Why the Sky Deck Becomes the Heart

A building can have extraordinary residences and still feel anonymous. What turns a building into a community is the shared space, the place where neighbors become familiar, where a Sunday afternoon becomes something worth looking forward to, where the city or the desert or the lake reminds you why you chose to live here. At Optima, the sky deck is designed to be that place.

It works because it’s never designed generically. It works because the pool is the right size, in the right place, oriented to the right view. Because the fire pit is close enough to the lounge seating to make a conversation easy, and far enough from the pool to give the space room to breathe. Because the running track goes where the best views are. Because every detail, from the shade structure to the bar placement to the choice of materials underfoot, was considered by the same people who designed the building below.

At Optima, the sky deck isn’t the amenity at the top. It’s part of the design from the very beginning.

Come see the view for yourself. Schedule a tour at an Optima community today.

Sustainable architecture gets a lot of attention for what it does for the environment. But there’s a quieter, more personal story worth telling, about what it does for the people living inside it. At Optima, green building design has always been both things at once: responsible to the planet, and deeply beneficial to the resident. 

Nature Built into the Building Itself 

One of the most visible expressions of Optima’s sustainable philosophy is our living architecture. The lushly planted vertical gardens at Optima Sonoran Village, Optima Kierland and Optima McDowell Mountain aren’t decorative, they regulate building temperature, filter air, and create a buffer from the desert heat. The soaring skylit atrium at Optima Lakeview fills the heart of the building with natural light and greenery year-round. At Optima Verdana, landscaped terraces maintained year-round with Optima’s signature vertical gardening system ensure that living greenery is present at every level of the building, from the ground floor to the rooftop sky deck. These systems aren’t added on. They’re woven into the architecture itself, which is precisely what makes them work. 

The Air You Breathe at Home 

At Optima, we select eco-friendly materials, prioritize advanced ventilation, and choose finishes that don’t compromise the environment residents breathe every day. The result is that the air inside an Optima residence is often cleaner than the air outside, a quiet, invisible benefit that residents feel without always being able to name. 

Comfort, Quiet, and Better Sleep 

A sustainably designed building maintains a more consistent internal temperature, reducing the swings that make a home feel like it’s fighting the climate rather than coexisting with it. Thoughtfully engineered walls, windows, and rooflines keep Optima interiors regulated and calm, whether facing an Arizona summer or a Chicago winter. And the denser, higher-quality materials used in sustainable construction also happen to be excellent acoustic insulators. Less noise means lower cortisol, better sleep, and a nervous system that gets to rest. 

Sustainability and Luxury Are the Same Value 

At Optima, we’ve never seen sustainability and luxury as competing ideas. The most responsible home to build, one that breathes cleanly, connects residents to nature, and endures beautifully over time, is also, by design, one of the finest homes to live in. Across every Optima community, every green choice is equally a choice in favor of the quality of resident life. 

The planet benefits. But so does everyone who comes home here each evening. 

Experience it for yourself. Schedule a tour at an Optima community today. 

In the hills of Jackson, Mississippi, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fountainhead stands as one of the architect’s most intimate and inventive late-career works—an embodiment of the principles that defined a movement and continue to inform the way we design, build, and live today.

Completed in 1948 for newspaper publisher Charles T. Johnson, Fountainhead is a study in clarity and conviction. Its low, sheltering roofline; its bold horizontality; and its organic fusion with the landscape make the home feel grounded yet expansive, private yet open. True to Wright’s Usonian ideals, Fountainhead rejects ornament and excess in favor of purpose, flow, and a profound connection to place.

A House That Breathes With Its Site
Fountainhead’s bold triangular geometry is one of its most striking features. Rather than centering the plan around a traditional grid, Wright turned the house on an angle that captures light, frames long views of the wooded acreage, and creates a sense of dynamic movement as you step through the spaces. The home’s carport, cantilevers, and carefully choreographed circulation pathways feel like extensions of the landscape itself.

Brick, cypress, and concrete interlock with ease, reinforcing Wright’s belief that materials should feel native, honest, and alive. Meanwhile, custom built-ins—signature to his residential work—express a belief in designing the entire environment, from structure to storage to the smallest detail of daily life.

A Legacy That Resonates
The spirit of Fountainhead resonates deeply with Optima®’s own Modernist DNA. While decades—and tectonic shifts in technology, fabrication, and cultural expectations—separate Wright’s Usonian experiments from Optima’s contemporary communities, the philosophical throughline remains unmistakable.

Like Wright, Optima® is committed to creating architecture that responds to context rather than overpowering it; that invites natural light in generous, life-enhancing ways; and that integrates materials not merely for aesthetic effect, but for performance, longevity, and honest expression. Optima’s signature use of glass and concrete, its devotion to clean lines, and its belief in open, flexible, light-filled interiors all echo Wright’s conviction that architecture must elevate how people live every day.

Where Wright pioneered the idea of living “in harmony with nature,” Optima® advances that ethos for our time—through biophilic elements, desert-sensitive design, lush landscaped terraces, and high-performance glazing that blurs the boundary between inside and out.

A Living Tradition at Optima®
Fountainhead’s enduring relevance reminds us that Modernism is not a style frozen in time—it is a living tradition of problem-solving, clarity, and human-focused design. Wright’s work demonstrated that beauty and functionality are not opposites; they are partners. That innovation is not about novelty; it is about making life better, richer, more connected.

At Optima®, that legacy continues. Across all of our communities — Optima Signature® and Optima Lakeview® in Chicago, Optima Verdana® in Wilmette, and Optima Kierland Apartments®, Optima Sonoran Village® and Optima McDowell Mountain® in Scottsdale— we, too, embrace architecture as a means of bringing light, openness, and intention into everyday life.

Fountainhead stands as a reminder of what’s possible when design is both disciplined and daring. More than seventy-five years after its completion, it remains a beacon of modern living—and a touchstone for those of us carrying forward the enduring, ever-evolving language of Modernism.

Some architects reshape skylines with spectacle. Others reshape the field through quiet conviction—through spaces that reward attention, invite contemplation, and honor the material world. Billie Tsien belongs to the latter lineage: a designer whose work is rooted in calm strength, subtle detailing, and a deep belief that architecture is, at its best, an act of care.

Co-founder of the New York–based firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (TWBTA), she has spent more than four decades creating buildings that feel grounded, humane, and timeless. With her partner in life and work, Tod Williams, Tsien has developed a practice defined not by signature gestures but by a philosophy—one that takes materiality seriously, attends to atmosphere, and centers the lived experience of the people who inhabit a space.

This devotion to thoughtful, human-centered design resonates strongly with Optima®’s own architectural ethos—where form, material, and experience are inseparable, and where buildings are crafted to enrich daily life rather than overwhelm it.

An Architecture of Patience and Presence
Billie Tsien’s design sensibility is shaped by ideas of slowness: slow craft, slow material change, slow discovery. Her buildings reveal themselves gradually, often through careful transitions, intimate courtyards, filtered light, or tactile surfaces that invite touch.

To Tsien, architecture is not about instant recognition—it’s about long-term resonance. “What we make should last and be loved,” she has said, a principle that can be felt in every project she touches.

Consider some of TWBTA’s most celebrated works:

• The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, where textured concrete panels, rich wood, and studied proportions create a museum that is both monumental and deeply personal.
• The Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, a building that is at once bold and introspective, its heavy massing balanced by a light-filled tower that celebrates the creative process.
• The Obama Presidential Center, currently under construction, where the team’s sensibilities around craft, public space, and civic generosity guide a project of national significance.

Materiality is Tsien’s language. She gravitates toward surfaces that weather with dignity—stone, copper, bronze, concrete, wood—materials that record time and strengthen a building’s relationship with its surroundings.

This deeply material-forward approach aligns with Optima®’s commitment to architectural authenticity, expressed through its own use of sculptural concrete, expressive glass, and carefully articulated details across its Chicago, Winnetka, and Scottsdale communities. Both practices share the belief that materials should feel honest and integral—not decorative, but essential.

The Strength of a Thoughtful Partnership
The partnership between Billie Tsien and Tod Williams is one of the most enduring collaborations in contemporary architecture. Their dynamic is not a duality but a conversation—steadfast, inquisitive, and rooted in mutual respect. Together, they approach each project as a site-specific inquiry: What does this place need? What would make it feel deeply itself? How can a building foster connection—between people, between past and present, between material and meaning?

Quiet Power in a Loud Culture
In an age of architectural spectacle, Billie Tsien stands apart. Her commitment to craft and authenticity feels almost radical in its restraint. She believes that the most beautiful spaces often emerge from modesty and intention, not excess. Her buildings are made to be lived in, learned from, and loved over time. She elevates the everyday: the texture of a handrail, the depth of a window reveal, the soft transition from exterior to interior. She designs spaces that ask us to slow down and feel.

A Legacy Still Unfolding
Billie Tsien has reshaped the field through buildings, but also through leadership, mentorship, and advocacy. She has served as president of the Architectural League of New York, as a guiding figure at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and as an inspiring presence for the next generation of architects—especially women seeking models of practice grounded in integrity and depth. Her contribution is measured not only in iconic projects, but in the values she champions: care, curiosity, calm, generosity.

In the evolving story of contemporary architecture, few have done more to dissolve boundaries — between disciplines, between built and natural environments, between imagination and form — than Marion Weiss. As cofounder of Weiss/Manfredi, she has spent her career redefining what it means to design “between” things: architecture and landscape, art and infrastructure, public and private space.

Weiss’s work embodies a philosophy of integration — an idea that resonates deeply with the Optima® ethos. Together with partner Michael Manfredi, she has created a portfolio of projects that move gracefully across scales and contexts, proving that design is not about asserting control over the environment, but about choreographing relationships within it.

Born in Philadelphia, Weiss studied at the University of Virginia and Yale School of Architecture, where she was drawn to the power of the landscape as both context and collaborator. That early interest has shaped her design sensibility ever since. In Weiss’s world, topography is never background; it is the generative force that gives architecture its shape and meaning.

Among her most acclaimed projects, the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle remains a masterclass in synthesis. Carved from a challenging urban site, the design creates a continuous, unfolding experience that moves from city to water, weaving art and ecology into a single living tapestry. The park transforms what was once a derelict industrial zone into a civic landscape of connection and renewal — a poetic act of urban repair that embodies Weiss’s belief in design as both sculptural and social.

That same sensibility defines later works such as the Barnard College Diana Center in New York, where translucent layers of glass and structure reveal an interior life of collaboration, study, and movement. Or the La Brea Tar Pits Master Plan, where Weiss/Manfredi reimagines a storied site of natural and cultural history as a place of discovery — one that honors the deep time beneath our feet while creating new ways to experience it.

Through it all, Weiss maintains a profound commitment to education and mentorship. As the Graham Chair Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, she challenges students to think expansively — to see architecture not as object-making, but as a spatial dialogue with the world.

For Weiss, the act of design begins with listening: to the site, to the climate, to the people who will inhabit the space. Her projects feel less like monuments and more like continuities — extensions of the landscape that invite participation and movement.

This perspective resonates with Optima®’s own architectural philosophy, where transparency, light, and integration with nature are central to how people live and interact within space. Both approaches seek to dissolve the barriers between interior and exterior life, between structure and setting — allowing architecture to breathe, adapt, and evolve.

In an era increasingly defined by environmental urgency and social complexity, Marion Weiss reminds us that architecture’s greatest strength lies in its capacity to connect. Her work suggests that when we design with empathy — for place, for people, for possibility — we create spaces that endure not by standing apart, but by belonging deeply to their context.

At Optima®, we recognize a kindred vision in Weiss’s work — one that views architecture as a living interface between people and the natural world. Just as Weiss/Manfredi projects flow seamlessly from structure to landscape, Optima®’s communities blur the boundary between indoors and out through expansive glazing, lush terraces, and thoughtfully layered green spaces.

In Wilmette, Scottsdale, and Chicago alike, that philosophy takes form in buildings that engage light, climate, and topography with the same sensitivity Weiss brings to every site she touches. Both perspectives affirm that the most inspiring architecture doesn’t resist its environment — it collaborates with it.

Through her practice, Marion Weiss has shown that design can be both ambitious and attuned, sculptural and sustainable, artful and human. It’s a balance that continues to guide the evolution of Optima®’s own spaces — where architecture, landscape, and life come together as one.

As our Women in Architecture series continues, we turn our attention to Anne Lacaton, an architect whose work stands as both a design philosophy and a social statement. Through her Paris-based practice Lacaton & Vassal, founded with Jean-Philippe Vassal in 1987, she has championed an approach that is at once radical and humane—reimagining how architecture can improve lives through restraint, adaptability, and an unwavering respect for what already exists.

Lacaton’s work is guided by a deceptively simple principle: never demolish, always add, transform, and reuse. Where others see outdated buildings, she sees potential. Her architecture resists spectacle and excess, instead offering generosity through space, light, and life. This ethos has reshaped social housing in Europe, challenged conventional notions of urban renewal, and offered a compelling model for sustainable design that prioritizes people over prestige.

Born in Saint-Pardoux, France, in 1955, Lacaton studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture in Bordeaux and later in Dakar, Senegal—a formative experience that expanded her understanding of how architecture responds to both climate and culture. Together with Vassal, she began exploring a design language rooted in economy, flexibility, and care. Their earliest works—lightweight pavilions, experimental houses, and reimagined apartments—revealed an architectural intelligence that merged technical ingenuity with social conscience.

Among Lacaton & Vassal’s most celebrated projects is the Transformation of 530 Dwellings in Bordeaux (2017), a public housing retrofit that became a manifesto for architectural renewal. Instead of demolishing and rebuilding, the team expanded each unit with winter gardens and balconies, doubling living space while keeping residents in place. The result was not only more sustainable but profoundly more human—offering residents dignity, comfort, and beauty without displacement.That same philosophy runs through other transformative works: the Tour Boils-le-Prêtre in Paris, the Palais de Tokyo renovation, and the FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais contemporary art museum. Each project demonstrates how design can be both pragmatic and poetic—doing more with less, and doing it for the public good.

In 2021, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field’s highest honor. The jury cited their “commitment to a restorative architecture,” one that enriches lives rather than consumes resources. It was a moment that solidified Lacaton’s place among the most important architects of our time—not because she builds monuments, but because she redefines what value in architecture truly means.

For residents of Optima® communities, Lacaton’s work offers a resonant parallel. Her designs, like Optima’s own, embrace light, openness, and flexibility—qualities that elevate daily life while honoring context and sustainability. Both approaches reveal how thoughtful design can cultivate community, adapt over time, and bring nature meaningfully into the home.

At Optima®, we often speak of architecture as a living system, one that evolves with its inhabitants. Lacaton’s work embodies that same belief. Her buildings are never static; they invite transformation. They remind us that the most responsible act of design may be not to start over, but to see what already exists with new eyes. They also remind us that to create well is to care: for people, for resources, for the future. In her words, “Transformation is an opportunity to do better—beautifully.”