Painted Desert Complex: Neutra Designs the Park

The low, flat-roofed buildings at the north entrance to Petrified Forest National Park look like they belong in Palm Springs, not the Arizona high desert. That's because they were designed by Richard Neutra, the Austrian-born modernist architect known for his California residential work. Neutra and his partner Robert Alexander won the commission as part of Mission Sixty-Six, a decade-long National Park Service program launched in nineteen fifty-six to rebuild and modernize park facilities across the country before the agency's fiftieth anniversary in nineteen sixty-six.

Construction here ran from nineteen sixty-one to nineteen sixty-five. The visitor center opened in nineteen sixty-three. These are the only Neutra-designed buildings in the entire National Park System, and they remain among the purest expressions of Mission Sixty-Six modernism anywhere.

The complex was designated a National Historic Landmark in December twenty sixteen.