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Blockbuster Buildings: Architecture In The National Park System

 In addition to significant natural and cultural features, the national parks preserve some surprising and important works of architecture, too.

Ask people to name the most iconic buildings in the United States, and they will probably rattle off some usual suspects—structures like the Chrysler Building in New York City, Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, or the Capitol Records Building in Los Angeles. Ask them to describe the national parks, however, and chances are architecture won’t be the first thing that leaps to mind. Yet the national parks also contain many notable works of architecture, ranging from rustic and rough-hewn to modern and sleek.  

The type of architecture most frequently associated with the parks is the naturalistic style seen in many early 20th-century park buildings, a design commonly referred to as “parkitecture.” Structures of heavy timber and stone took their cues from their surroundings, offering a rugged and romantic feel for park visitors. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps built many modest structures such as picnic shelters and cabins in this style, too, further reinforcing its prominence. Some of the structures from this era, such as architect Mary Colter’s buildings at the Grand Canyon, were also inspired by the vernacular architecture of indigenous peoples.

By mid-century, however, parkitecture had fallen out of favor, as park managers sought updated, forward-thinking designs that were better able to serve growing numbers of park visitors. The National Park Service’s famous Mission 66 program, conceived to coincide with the Park Service’s 50th anniversary in 1966 and to welcome vacationing Baby Boomers into the parks, ushered in a decade-long building boom that produced a new wave of park buildings designed in a modernist style, with contributions from such architectural heavyweights as Richard Neutra and the firm once led by Frank Lloyd Wright. This era also produced an enduring building that was itself a modern interpretation of a classical building form--the Gateway Arch, designed by Eero Saarinen (famous for the TWA Terminal in New York).

Here are a few examples of world-class architecture found in the national parks.

Beaver Meadows Visitor Center, Rocky Mountain National Park/Dirk Huizenga, Wiki Commons

Beaver Meadows Visitor Center, Rocky Mountain National Park/Dirk Huizenga, Wiki Commons

Beaver Meadows Visitor Center, Rocky Mountain National Park

Frank Lloyd Wright—designer of Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania, the Robie House in Chicago, and the Guggenheim museum in New York, among many other buildings—was arguably the best-known American architect of the 20th century. Understandably concerned about his legacy, Wright’s apprentices created a successor firm, Taliesin Associated Architects, to develop projects in his signature style after his death in 1959. One of the firm’s first and most indelible projects was the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center at Rocky Mountain National Park. Designed in an archetypal Wright style and opened in 1967, the building features horizontal rooflines and earthy materials such as native sandstone. And yet, befitting its status as a modern Mission 66 project, the building also features a repeating triangular motif that abstractly references the surrounding mountains, and Cor-Ten steel beams that provide contrast to the stone and surrounding pine forest. The building, as Ethan Carr wrote in his book Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma, “proved that great design could find appropriate uses and expression in a national park.” The building was designated as a national historic landmark in 2001.

Mary Colter at Grand Canyon/NPS

Mary Colter at Grand Canyon/NPS

Colter’s Grand Canyon, Grand Canyon National Park

In the late 19th century, woman architects were nearly unheard of. And yet in the 1880s a plucky young woman named Mary Colter, whose family had left Pennsylvania and moved West, entered design school in California. By the early years of the 20th century, Colter had become the in-house designer for the Fred Harvey Company, whose founder had created a Western empire of rail-station hotels and restaurants. Colter’s Harvey connection brought her to Grand Canyon National Park, where she would go on to design a series of buildings that were inspired by indigenous Pueblo tribal buildings as well as Spanish colonial architecture. Colter-designed buildings at the Grand Canyon include the stone Hopi House, the Desert Watchtower, and the riverside Phantom Ranch. “Colter is so important because in that period there were so few women architects,” says Hugh Miller, a former chief historical architect for NPS. “Hopi House was built in 1905. She was practiced well into the 1940s. In terms of setting the scene at the Grand Canyon, Colter really did that.”

The Flamingo Visitor Center at Everglades National Park/Acroterion, Wiki Commons

The Flamingo Visitor Center at Everglades National Park/Acroterion, Wiki Commons

Flamingo Visitor Center, Everglades National Park

Like its long-legged feathered namesake, the Flamingo Visitor Center at Everglades National Park is bright pink and set on stilts. This cheerful modernist building was designed by NPS architect Cecil John Doty, with help from a Florida architect named Harry Keck. Doty had been trained in the rustic parkitecture style, but adapted easily to the new modernist aesthetic of Mission 66 and became one of its most prolific in-house NPS designers. The building features an upper level observation area that overlooks Florida Bay, an “unusual juxtaposition of airy open spaces,” according to author Ethan Carr. The Flamingo Visitor Center is now undergoing a rehabilitation that will maintain its historic qualities while updating the interior, expected to be complete in 2020.

Jackson Lake Lodge under construction at Grand Teton National Park/NPS

Jackson Lake Lodge under construction at Grand Teton National Park/NPS

Jackson Lake Lodge, Grand Teton National Park

Several of the parks’ most famous lodges can be traced to one man--architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood. He was a master of the rustic style, which he applied to Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel, the Bryce Canyon Lodge, and the Old Faithful Lodge (not to be confused with the Old Faithful Inn—see below), among others. One of his last works, the Jackson Lake Lodge at Grand Teton, is particularly interesting because it illustrates the transition the parks were making from the rustic style into a modernist style. Underwood combined these aesthetics in the exterior by using concrete, a modernist staple, but texturing it to resemble wood grain and staining it light brown. The spare linear forms and banks of windows were further modernist touches. “The Jackson Lake Lodge,” Carr wrote in his book, “revised traditional assumptions about what made architecture ‘appropriate’ in the setting of a national park.”

Jackson Lake Lodge, Grand Teton National Park/Acroterion Wiki Commons

Jackson Lake Lodge, Grand Teton National Park/Acroterion Wiki Commons

Kohlberg House, Cape Cod National Seashore/CCMHT

Kohlberg House, Cape Cod National Seashore/Cape Cod Modern House Trust

Kohlberg House, Cape Cod National Seashore

Sometimes the Park Service manages properties that come under the agency’s care but were not originally built for park visitors. At Cape Cod National Seashore, the park found itself the steward of mid-century modern houses that were built after legislation to create the park was introduced in 1959 but before the park was designated in 1961. One of these properties, the Kohlberg house (so named for its former owner, Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg), has sat abandoned on a high bluff at the cape for years, but thanks to a recent agreement between NPS and the Cape Cod Modern House Trust, it is now being restored. Although the house is not associated with a big-name architect—it was designed by a local builder named Luther Crowell—it retains many architectural features of that time period, including a bank of large windows and a slanting shed roof.

Old Faithful Inn, Yellowstone National Park/NPS, Jim Peaco

Old Faithful Inn, Yellowstone National Park/NPS, Jim Peaco

Old Faithful Inn, Yellowstone National Park

In Yellowstone National Park, it’s impossible to upstage Old Faithful itself, but the Old Faithful Inn comes close. One of the oldest log structures in the park system, and certainly the largest, Old Faithful Inn opened in 1904 and has provided crowds with a perfect view of the world’s most famous geyser ever since. Designed by a young architect named Robert Reamer, the inn’s most notable feature is its tall, steep, gabled roof and the massive stone fireplace that anchors the interior. Much of the material was harvested locally, including lodgepole pine from nearby forests. It was designated a national historic landmark in 1987. “Old Faithful Inn is an icon; it’s the granddaddy,” Miller says. “It doesn’t get much better than that--that steep sloping roof and all those dormer windows, and the attention to detail in the woodwork and the interiors. It really is rustic and an early example of the style.”

Painted Desert CC, Petrified Forest National Park/NPS

Painted Desert CC, Petrified Forest National Park/NPS

Painted Desert Community Complex, Petrified Forest National Park

In his book on Mission 66, Ethan Carr calls Richard Neutra “the most renowned architect to work as a consultant to Mission 66.” With his partner Robert Alexander, Neutra was known for his minimalism, according to Sarah Allaback, author of Mission 66 Visitor Centers: The History of a Building Type, evidenced by the duo’s design of the white concrete-and-glass cyclorama center at Gettysburg National Military Park. In 1958, Neutra and Alexander went even farther with the 22-acre Painted Desert Community Complex at Petrified Forest National Park, which combined a visitor center, housing, and maintenance facilities. The complex is designed in a pure modernist style that features unadorned facades, sharp rectilinear facades, and horizontal rows of windows, and was named a national historic landmark in 2017. Sadly, Neutra’s Cyclorama building was demolished in 2013.

Wright Brothers Visitor Center/Rick Pilot

Wright Brothers Visitor Center/Rick Pilot

Wright Brothers National Memorial Visitor Center

Last year, one of the most distinctive Mission 66 buildings reopened after an extensive renovation: the Wright Brothers National Memorial Visitor Center in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Designed by Philadelphia architects Ehrman Mitchell and Romaldo Giurgola, the 1960 building features a space-age dome-like structure over the interior, which houses a replica of the first plane the Wright Brothers momentously flew across the sand dunes. Although visitors inside the center can see the hilltop memorial in the distance and markers indicating the distances of the brothers’ first successful flights, visitors are nonetheless oriented towards the airplane. “It’s a one-off design for that object,” Miller says. “Most visitor centers are oriented towards an expansive view, but here the object is the centerpiece and it works. I think it’s one of the more adventurous in terms of structure design.”

These days, the most prominent trend in park architecture is that park buildings are now designed with sustainability in mind, such as the Lands End Lookout at Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which earned LEED Platinum status from the U.S. Green Building Council for the use of natural heating and cooling techniques, natural daylighting, and reclaimed wood. As this list shows, buildings in the parks have always delighted and inspired visitors; now they are doing good things for the earth as well.

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Comments

I like the Jackson Lake Lodge.  I guess it's not so much in the rustic style that Underwood championed for national parks, but his history included adapting his styles, including several train stations in more of an Art Deco style.

At least it wasn't like some of the monstrosities from the Mission 66 campaign like the old Jackson Visitor Center at Mt Rainier. That thing looked like a flying saucer rising out of the ground.  The only saving grace was the public showers, which only cost 25 cents for what an employee referred to as "7 minutes of lukewarm water".

https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2008/11/end-era-mount-rainier-nati...


The old Jackson VC was a much cooler and more memorable structure than its bland and tepid neo-rustic replacement. And, it offered 360deg views of both Mount Rainier and the rest of the Cascades.

Too bad that it cost a bundle to heat as it wasn't designed for the Paradise snowfall - a pretty big oversight on the part of both the NPS project managers and, to a lesser extent, the architects.

Frankly, parks could do with far fewer boring and ugly National Park Service Rustic and neo-rustic structures. Though parks are intentionally letting modernist structures rot so they can be replaced with... more bland "half-timbered" nonsense. See: Gettysburg and the Neutra Cyclorama.

This comment was edited to remove potentially libelous language. -- Ed.


I _like_ the M66 VC at Cabrillo N.M.: big round poles with vertical wood siding, and the M-66 standard floor to ceiling glass walls for views  Heating & cooling are not big issues at Cabrillo, although the main VC needs the high windows restored to openable to let the heat out a few days per year.  In the next few years it might get restored from the current light gray paint on all the wood to the original redwood look.  The redwood siding is in pretty good shape under the paint, and newer finishes can protect the wood much better than 50 years ago.  


Concur with y_p_w. The jackson Lake Lodge was designed to maximize views. It succeeds.


https://www.curbed.com/2017/8/2/16083766/rustic-architecture-parkitectur...
Correction:
The Crater Lake Superintendent's Residence Shown
Is Really The Superintendent's Secretary's Residence.


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Gilbert Stanley Underwood/Archives

A young Gilbert Stanley Underwood/Archives

Gilbert Stanley Underwood and Jackson Lake Lodge At Grand Teton National Park

By Kurt Repanshek

Some years ago I wrote a magazine piece about Jackson Lake Lodge, the final national park creation of Gilbert Stanley Underwood. Underwood was a giant when it comes to national park lodges, having designed The Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, Bryce Canyon Lodge, the Grand Canyon Lodge on the canyon's North Rim, and Zion Lodge, to name the most prominent structures in his parks portfolio.

Personally, I don't think the Jackson Lake Lodge, although it offers spectacular views of Grand Teton National Park, stands up to those other lodges. Of course, when this project took root in the mid-1950s, it marked a turning point in national park architecture. The agency was done with its romantic Arts and Crafts period and was moving into its Mission 66 phase, which placed an emphasis on handling large numbers of tourists as Americans were beginning to hit the road in large numbers to explore the country during their vacations.

Nestled among sagebrush, pines, and aspen on a terrace above its namesake lake, Jackson Lake Lodge stands out on the landscape. Its ponderous profile is laid low, as if its designer strived to minimize the hotel’s incongruity with the surrounding landscape of towering mountains and shimmering water.

Built from slabs of concrete and sweeping panes of glass in an emphatic declaration that the National Park Service’s romance with Arts and Crafts-influenced lodging was unquestionably over, Jackson Lake Lodge made an architectural statement when it opened for business on June 11, 1955. A stark contrast to the rustic mastery Underwood wielded when he designed lodges in Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Zion national parks, this lodge marked a turning point for both the Park Service and the country.

And it wasn’t necessarily welcomed.

“What disturbs many modern visitors is the lodge’s utilitarian appearance and its poor relationship to the surroundings,” Joyce Zaitlin, a member of the American Institute of Architects, noted in her 1989 biography of Underwood, Gilbert Stanley Underwood; His Rustic, Art Deco and Federal Architecture.

“Admirers of Underwood’s earlier works are often shocked to see so little resemblance to his earlier romantic lodges,” she wrote.

More recently, Paul Shea, a former curator of the Yellowstone Historic Center in West Yellowstone, Montana, was blunter in his assessment of Underwood’s final work.

“It’s probably his most bizarre creation,” Shea said without hesitation. “The building itself looks like a giant bomb shelter.”

Gilbert Stanley Underwood was one of the architectural titans of the first half of the 20th century. He was a contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright, and brothers Charles and Henry Greene, designers who integrated their creations into the environment as comfortably and unobtrusively as possible. For his part, Underwood helped define the “rustic style” that applied native rock, massive timbers, and steeply pitched roofs to many of the national park lodges built during the 1920s and 1930s.

Much of his guidance likely came from Stephen Mather, the Park Service’s first director who, Zaitlin notes, had “strong ideas about the types of structures to be built in areas under the agency’s jurisdiction. Deeply concerned with protecting the natural beauty of the lands, (Mather and his assistants) felt it vital that all construction be non-intrusive and in harmony with the natural surroundings.”

Between 1924, when Underwood designed both the dining hall at Cedar Breaks National Monument and the lodges at Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks, and 1955, when Jackson Lake Lodge opened, he worked at an almost non-stop pace. He designed The Ahwahnee as well as the Union Pacific Railroad dining hall at West Yellowstone; the Grand Canyon Lodge on the park’s North Rim; the Timberline ski resort lodge in Oregon; the Sun Valley Lodge and the Challenger Inn in Sun Valley; the U.S. Mint in San Francisco; the Williamsburg Lodge and York House in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia; two post offices in Alaska; the War Department and State Department Building in Washington; the Defense Workers’ Housing Development in California; the Seattle courthouse; resident halls for women in Washington, and at least 10 railroad station depots.

Not to be overlooked was employee housing Underwood designed for Alcatraz Island when it housed its namesake prison, a project Zaitlin hints at in her dissection of Jackson Lake Lodge.

“From today’s vantage point, it is clear that many decisions were made both before and during construction that contributed to some of the lodge’s problems, and it is not so apparent on whose head the blame rests,” she wrote. “Many have charged the architect with choosing urban materials and techniques, of creating prison-like architecture for an area of spectacular beauty. If the lodge is seen as a structure characteristic of 1950s design and as an attempt to provide a fireproof building on a site with a spectacular view, then the building may be seen more advantageously.

“Those seeking Underwood’s Art Deco and rustic elements, however, are certain to be disappointed.”

Clearly, Underwood, who never graduated from high school yet wound up with an undergraduate degree from Yale University and a master’s degree from Harvard, wasn’t tightly wedded to “Parkitecture,” as his national park projects later came to be described. He could ably design charming park lodges imbued with rustic touches of logs and rock and arts-and-crafts flourishes while also creating coldly efficient federal buildings. His federal courthouse in Seattle came to define “federal Art Deco,” while the poured-in-place concrete that went into the Anchorage federal courthouse was dubbed “New Deal Concrete.”

And, from time to time, Underwood found good use for concrete in the national parks. When he designed the massive and breathtaking Ahwahnee Hotel that opened in Yosemite in 1927, Underwood used weathered granite for the exterior walls and concrete in place of timbers and planks. By pouring concrete into wood-lined forms and then staining it so it would appear to be redwood in both texture and color he created “shadowood,” a technique that resurfaced at Jackson Lake Lodge.

So it shouldn’t have been too surprising that Underwood would employ concrete in designing Jackson Lake Lodge. What is surprising is the extent of its use and the “basic rectangular boxes with shed roofs” that the architect created. Whereas The Ahwahnee fits smoothly into the rockscape of Yosemite and the Grand Canyon Lodge seems almost part of the canyon, Jackson Lake Lodge stands out abruptly and, for the most part, lacks the “rusticism” that defined Underwood’s earlier park lodges.

Today’s Grand Teton National Park is a testament to John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s determination and philanthropy. The New York blueblood was introduced to Jackson Hole in 1926 by Horace Albright, then superintendent of Yellowstone National Park.

Albright at the time harbored a dream of preserving the Tetons by annexing them to Yellowstone, and he hoped to enlist Rockefeller in his effort to conserving the Tetons “and the whole valley north of Jackson.”

He would succeed beyond expectation. Rockefeller and his wife, Abby, were disturbed by what they saw during the trip, asking Albright why telephone lines, billboards, and ramshackle buildings were allowed to clutter the views.

“The Rockefellers expressed great concern that this spectacular country was rapidly going the way of development and destruction,” Albright, who later became head of the National Park Service, wrote in The Birth of the National Park Service.

To counter the clutter, Rockefeller shortly thereafter pledged $2 million and created the Snake River Land Co., which quietly began to purchase private lands beneath the Tetons with the intent of turning them over to the federal government. By the early 1940s Rockefeller had amassed 35,000 acres, which he donated to become part of Jackson Hole National Monument in 1943.

Seven years later, during a vacation in Moran, Rockefeller’s interest in building a lodge on the edge of Jackson Lake was kindled by Harold Fabian, a Salt Lake City attorney who had chartered the Snake River Land Co. at Rockefeller’s request. Soon after Rockefeller returned to New York City, he dispatched Underwood and Tom Vint, the Park Service’s chief of planning and design, to Jackson Hole to begin designs for the lodge.

When Rockefeller called Underwood out of retirement in 1950 for the lodge project, the country was at a crossroads, both societal and architectural. The nation was recovering from World War II and the Baby Boom generation was on its way and anxious to see the country. The lack of accommodations in Grand Teton National Park also was creating health problems, as tourists were camping anywhere they could along the roadways.

“… the sanitary conditions along the roads and in the parking areas resulting from people sleeping in their cars, and camping over night at picture turnouts and wherever they can pull off the road, without the facilities provided except the sagebrush and trees, are getting to be a real menace and a threat from the spread of germs carried by flies,” Fabian said in a rambling letter to Albright in August 1952 that recounted Rockefeller’s interest in building Jackson Lake Lodge.

While there was a definite need for accommodations in Grand Teton, the cost of building a lodge had rocketed from the early days of Underwood’s career. Cheap labor in the form of the Civilian Conservation Corps was no longer available, and material prices had increased substantially.

Underwood outlined in 24 pages how public lodgings should be laid out at Grand Teton National Park. Along with selecting “Moose Hill,” one of Rockefeller’s favorite overlooks of the lake, for Jackson Lake Lodge, Underwood also recommended copious use of concrete.

“Construction should be of at least semi-fireproof construction,” he wrote in his proposal. “It would be desirable to develop a reinforced concrete or light steel frame, and fireproof floors. … The exterior of the building could be of stained concrete or stone to merge with local coloration. Advice should be sought from insurance experts on the savings in premiums that will result from fireproof or fire-resistant construction.”

At times the challenge was daunting.

“Cost estimates are running higher than a cat’s back on a picket fence,” Underwood wrote Fabian in September of 1952. “Therefore, will try a frame estimate, in lieu of fireproof.”

Despite Underwood’s departure from rusticism, his proposal was warmly received by Rockefeller and the National Park Service. Park Service Director Newton Drury called Underwood’s proposal “an admirable solution to the problem of providing the public concessions” in the park.

So ‘admirable” was the Modernistic concrete design that it arguably became the prototype for Mission 66 construction in the parks. Launched in 1956 by National Park Service Director Conrad Wirth to enhance visitors’ park experiences through better, more modern facilities, Mission 66 produced a sweeping infrastructure upgrade throughout the park system.