Painted Desert Complex: Richard Neutra Meets Mission Sixty-Six
Arizona
In nineteen fifty-six the National Park Service launched Mission Sixty-Six, a decade-long infrastructure program timed to the agency's fiftieth anniversary. The idea was to build modern visitor centers, roads, and housing across the park system in a style that honored landscape rather than fighting it. For the Petrified Forest, the NPS commissioned the modernist architect Richard Neutra and his partner Robert Alexander.
The complex they built between nineteen sixty-one and nineteen sixty-five is unlike anything else in the National Park System. Deep overhangs shade ribbon windows. Sliding glass doors open to views of the Painted Desert badlands.
Neutra's signature spider-leg steel columns lift the structure above the high-desert floor. The materials, stucco, concrete block, and glass, are spare and honest, refusing to compete with the two-hundred-twenty-five-million-year-old petrified wood outside. It is Neutra's best-known work inside the national parks, and in twenty sixteen it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
A building this good, this far out in the Arizona desert, is its own kind of wonder.
