Mary E.J. Colter: Architect & Designer

On May 15, 1930, La Posada Hotel opened in Winslow, Arizona. The architect, Mary E. J. Colter, proudly surveyed the building she had designed. Hers also was the interior decor and landscaping of the last of the Southwestern chain of hotels for Fred Harvey and the Santa Fe Railroad. La Posada, built at a cost of 1 million dollars, was one of twenty projects she created as architect and designer for Fred Harvey. Colter's introduction to architec-ture came in 1887 when, at 17, she plunged into studies at the Califor-nia Institute of Design (later the San Francisco Art Institute). As with many students, money was criti-cally short for young Mary. There was only a small sum left from her deceased father's life insurance, and whatever her mother and sis-ter could spare from earnings as milliners in her hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. While at the Institute, Mary worked part-time as an apprentice in an architect's office, which re-warded her with the practical train-ing necessary for her chosen field. Certification and degrees were rarein those days, and few college courses existed aimed specifically at an architectural career. (In later life, this California period would influence Colter's designs and help revive the Span-ish and Indian heritage of the Southwest in the Santa Fe style of architecture.) After graduation and a return to St. Paul-economic necessity in-sisted she find steady employment immediately to support herself, her mother, and her sister-she chose to teach mechanical and freehand drawing at the high school level. That was an acceptable profession for women. Meanwhile, she fur-thered her studies in architecture, history, archeology, and Indian arts. But it would be fifteen years before she could apply these skills and knowledge. Opportunity's knock finally came as a temporary job decorat-ing the interior of the Indian Building opposite the newly built Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the summer of 1902. The hotel, part of the Fred Harvey-Santa Fe Railroad chain, was Spanish Revival in style, de-signed to reflect the history of the area. Colter gloried in at last being able to employ her knowledge of history, native crafts, and colors and materials of the Southwest, knowledge she'd tap again in all her future projects. The task completed, Colter returned once more to teaching. But only briefly. Her skill and taste had made an impression. In 1904, when Fred Harvey began developing eloping the South Rim of the Grand Canyon as a tourist mecca, he hired Charles F. Whittle-sey of Chicago to create the El Tovar Hotel and Mary Colter to design Hopi House. Both buildings, which opened in 1905, are still standing. Hopi House, a re-creation, in many respects, of Southwestern Indian dwellings, Colter derived from Indian struc-tures at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. The project a success, she dropped teaching as a career. In 1910, after a stint designing window and interior displays for a Seattle, Washington, department store, Col-ter became a full-time employee of the Fred Harvey Company and the

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Mary E. J. Colter (1869-1958), architect and designer of romantic structures that exude the Indian and Spanish heritage of the Southwest.

Photo from the Mary Larkin Smith Collection, courtesy Northland Press. While employed by the Santa Fe Railroad and the Fred Harvey Corporation, Colter designed and decorated twenty buildings including (OPPOSITE PAGE) the Painted Desert Inn at Petrified Forest National Park, James Tallon photo, (LEFT) Desert View Watchtower at Grand Canyon National Park, Josef Muench photo, and the Fred Harvey shops at Union Station in Los Angeles, California (BELOW). Courtesy Santa Fe Industries, Inc.

Chicago-based Santa Fe Railroad.

For the next thirty-eight years, Colter designed buildings and decorated interiors in the Southwest, among them, the Lookout (1914), Hermits Rest (1914), Phantom Ranch (1922), The Watchtower (1932), Bright Angel Lodge (1936), and men's and women's dorms (1937), all at the Grand Canyon. Additionally, she decorated Fred Harvey shops in Union Stations in Kansas City, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles.

Her last assignment for Harvey, completed the year prior to her retirement in 1948 at age seventy-nine, was the Painted Desert Inn at the Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona. It is open to the public June through August.

Of all, her best work is perhaps reflected in the buildings at the Grand Canyon and La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, (the latter today is a Santa Fe Railroad warehouse).

Mary's accomplishments, though, were not without some struggle. She was particularly difficult to control regarding design and budgets. When supervising workers, she insisted upon perfection in construction and decorating. But her professionalism, expertise, and personality at last won admiration, if not friendship, among builders and workers.

Mary Colter died January 8, 1958, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, her legacy some twenty architectural and interior design projects throughout Arizona and the Southwest; a collection of rare Indian artifacts,pottery, jewelry, and art donated to Mesa Verde National Park; and a library of books on subjects from architecture and art to Indian lore, which is now part of the Grand Canyon Community Library. Butmore importantly, she left behind a personal philosophy: that the architecture and the interior design of a building must be in harmony with the environment in which it is placed.

The Wright way

Sunset at Taliesin West. Long shadows drape across the drafting room as the translucent ceiling admits flaxen light. Jackrabbits gambol across the lawn and quail mourn in the hills. The sun tints the lingering clouds pink, orange, and magenta. The gray-pink beams that span the roofs of this utopian architecture colony pick up the sunset and purple mountains, and echo them.

"Look at the cacti against the setting sun," instructs Charles Montooth, a Taliesin architect who joined Wright as an apprentice in 1945 and worked with him until his death in 1959. "You can discern their structure, but you can also see this lacy halo ornamenting them. Mr. Wright picked that up in the detailing of this building."

Frank Lloyd Wright learned volumes from the desert: color, texture, geometry. He loved the saguaro for their cantilevering. He abhorred the right angle and embraced the triangle, as does the desert. He tried, as Montooth says, "to show how people could live in harmony with the desert." They didn't listen. That irritated Wright, but it didn't surprise him. He designed more then fifty buildings for Arizona in the twenty-two winters that he spent here; eleven were constructed during his lifetime.

Taliesin West is the masterpiece. As architect Pietro Belluschi says, "More than any other works by the master, it shows how to grasp the mood of the land and transform it into a place of harmony and beauty." Taliesin's opposite number is Arizona State University's Grady Gammage Auditorium, a stew of classicism and Islamic wedding-cake pieces that has very little to do with "the mood of the land." It was based on a sketch for an opera house in Baghdad. But do not scorn it. When Horowitz played at Grady Gammage, even the people in the cheap ($25!) seats far away could hear-no, feel the most delicate pianissimos with heart-stopping intimacy. Grady Gammage is the best place to hear music in Arizona.

Twelve years after Wright's death, Phoenix was blessed with another fruit of his genius. In 1971, when First Christian Church was casting about for an architect, the pastor, the Reverend William S. Boice, remembered seeing Wright's "startling design" of 1950 for an unbuilt seminary. Boice sold the $2.5 million idea to his congregation, and Taliesin architect Aubrey Banks translated Wright's sketches into working drawings. The result is breathtaking. Its erratically polygonal windows reflect the forms of rocks and mountains; its columns are dances of concrete. It is capped not with a cross, but with a spire that looks like a Martian antenna. It is a church that says more about the potential of humanity than of the power of God-which was perfectly in character for Wright.

Wright lives on in Arizona through his firm, Taliesin Associated Architects. Divorced from the design mainstream, this firm remains reverent to Wright's principles of "organic architecture," ghostdrafting new buildings in his vocabulary. "We have the problem or perhaps the inspiration of living in the path of a man who created almost every possible architectural form," says Taliesin's John Rattenbury. "It's easy to be bizarre; not at all easy to come up with a house on a hill that grows naturally out of that hill, and do it in a form that Mr. Wright didn't already think of.

"It's a problem that concerns us all the time. Every one of us would give his eyeteeth to be able to design a building, then have the others come up and say, 'My God, you've done it!-a completely original expression that remains faithful to Mr. Wright's principles.'"

The history of Phoenix architecture at a glance (ABOVE), from restored Victorian homes at Heritage Square, to the glass and steel highrise of the Valley Center. Al Payne photo (LEFT) A startling inverted glass and steel pyramid, the Tempe Municipal Building balances atop its apex. Architects: Michael and Kemper Goodwin, Tempe. Herb and Dorothy McLaughlin photo (FAR LEFT) A Renaissance fantasy, the Borgata in Scottsdale. Architects: Jones and Mah, Scottsdale. Jerry Sieve photo

Fantasies

One disciple who declined to keep the faith was Paolo Soleri, who came to Arizona in 1947 to apprentice with Wright. These two visionaries shared one belief: that the idea is supreme, the execution secondary. But their works could hardly be more different.

Arcosanti, Soleri's “alternative urban environment,” bursts from the side of a deep ravine seventy miles north of Phoenix. Nine structures have been built since work began in 1970; the vast, crescent-shaped twenty-five-story megastructure intended to be a self-contained city of 5000 has not been started.

This idea Soleri calls “Arcology”—an architecture of such vast scope and completeness that it creates its own ecology. Soleri has wrapped it in his usual thicket of theology, metaphysics, and transcendentalism, but when all this is boiled off, what we have is a very elaborate beehive for human beings.

What exists of Arcosanti today is not beautiful. The concrete structures are cast into the elements of basic geometry: circle, cube, cylinder, arch, and apse. They do not flow gracefully from the land; they are imposed on it with surprising brutality. The vote here on this enormously controversial undertaking is that it will make one heck of a ruin.

But the idea, the dream, counts. “The single-family home is almost absurd at this point,” declares the slight, wiry architect in a small, hoarse voice. “You must decide whether you are going to be Americans or human beings. It is said that one American consumes as much as thirty Indians. It is easy to multiply the population of America and Canada by that figure, and come to an inescapable conclusion: 8 billion people cannot be suburbanites.” Soleri's other complex, open to the public, is Cosanti, his home and workshop in Paradise Valley. There are a dozen small, earth-cast concrete structures on this site, and they are everything Arcosanti is not: humane, approachable, sensitive. The gallery bears strong kinship to Gaudí's fantastic parc Güell, a playground in Barcelona. Indeed, there is a feeling of childlike naiveté coupled with the thrill of experimentation about Cosanti. Alas, a sign warns visitors, “The buildings at Cosanti were not designed to demonstrate Soleri's Arcology concept for cities, nor does Soleri advocate these configurations for universal usage....” Arizona bristles with architectural fantasies. There's the Tempe Municipal Building of 1971, a shocking but hand-some inverted pyramid. Architect Michael Goodwin defends the shape by pointing out that the building is self-shading in summer, and that the program called for stacked spaces of 3000, 7500, and 10,000 square feet - which clearly suggested a pyramid of one persuasion or another. It's a rational building-but its form is also powerful and fantastic, and memorable enough to have become a symbol for the city.

Some inverted pyramid. Architect Michael Goodwin defends the shape by pointing out that the building is self-shading in summer, and that the program called for stacked spaces of 3000, 7500, and 10,000 square feet - which clearly suggested a pyramid of one persuasion or another. It's a rational building-but its form is also powerful and fantastic, and memorable enough to have become a symbol for the city.

Tlaquepaque are exclusive shopping centers modeled on exotic old prototypesthe former on the Italian Village of San Gimignano and the latter on an artisans' market near Guadalajara, Mexico. Both are highly sanitized fantasies, but both are interesting for their sheer panache. On a recent morning in the Borgata, shoppers could hear the music system playing an arrangement of “Strangers in Paradise,” which seemed exactly what the developer was getting at.

Cutaway view, (TOP), shows the Valletta Spring complex, a planned construction at Arcosanti at Cordes Junction created by Paolo Soleri (LEFT). The cutaway view above shows the south elevation of the twenty-five-story building. Soleri's visionary design is tucked into a small canyon, an experiment in self-contained living. Quarters are small and centralized, leaving more land for other uses. Courtesy of the Cosanti Foundation.

An architecture for the desert

Margaret Spencer was not an environmentalist-the term was unknown when she came to Arizona. But the random, rambling collection of sixteen cottages she designed west of Tucson in the 1930s was one of the earliest protests against the way we were choosing to build Arizona. Rancho de las Lomas stands today, in quiet contrast to the tract housing and orderly subdivisions of the rest of Tucson. The cottages are built with native stone quarried a mile from the site. The legend still circulating is that Mrs. Spencer, a reg-istered architect, drew the floor plans on the ground with a stick, letting topogra-phy and whim have their way. True or not, these little buildings came to savor their environment instead of defying it. To watch a summer thunderstorm from a porch or window at Las Lomas is to be sheltered from the storm, yet to feel like a participant in it.

Other architects have explored other ways to relate their work to something that came before. Bennie Gonzalez' Scottsdale City Hall and Public Library of 1968 evoke powerful prehistoric images, while not imitating anything. Curiously, their setting is a lush park sprinkled with fountains, pools, grassy hillocks, and even two swans named Winnie and Pooh. Both the build-ings and the landscaping are quite lovely, but one says a great deal about the desert, while the other tries to repeal it.

In Tucson, architect Jack DeBartolo, Jr. scored a point in 1981 against the prevailing sentiment there that everything should be painted tepid tan or blah beige to blend with the desert. DeBartolo painted West-center, an alcoholism treatment facility, in what he called “sunset colors”-a bold scheme of sand, pink, orange, and rust, all offset by peekaboo bands of blue framing the columns and windows. We Arizona architects, says DeBartolo, ought to stop worrying so much about sand and let ourselves be inspired by this incredible sky.

And up among the boulders of Carefree, Mr. and Mrs. Hart W. Empie, inhabitants of that amazing boulder-dwelling con-ceived for them on that rainy day seven winters ago, gradually have learned that their relationship with it runs deeper than the architecture. That pile of boulders, they have discovered, has been inhabited for thousands of years. They have found a Hohokam fire pit, cooking vessels, and ceremonial “sun circles” near their home.

“We have a definite feeling that we're only here for a short period of time,” Empie says quietly, “and that we are part of a very long continuum.” In Arizona's architecture, that is an ethic that is beginning to reappear.