Beaver Meadows: Frank Lloyd Wright at the Park Gate
Near Estes Park, Colorado
The low, horizontal building at the main entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park is a work of architecture significant enough to hold National Historic Landmark status, and its story begins not in the park but in the National Park Service's ambition to reinvent itself after the Second World War.
By the mid-nineteen fifties, the park system was in rough shape. Roads were crumbling, facilities were outdated, and visitor numbers were surging. In nineteen fifty-six, the Park Service launched a ten-year initiative called Mission Sixty-Six, aimed at completing major infrastructure improvements by the park system's fiftieth anniversary in nineteen sixty-six. A central piece of that program was a new type of building that did not yet exist: the visitor center, a single facility that would orient visitors before they entered the backcountry rather than scattering interpretation across the landscape.
A hundred of these new visitor centers were built across the country. Five became internationally recognized for their architecture. The Beaver Meadows Visitor Center is one of those five.
The National Park Service commissioned Taliesin Associated Architects, the firm composed of Frank Lloyd Wright's apprentices, to design the building. E. Thomas Casey led the structural work, applying Wright's principle of organic architecture, which held that buildings should grow from their setting rather than being imposed on it. The team quarried sandstone with lichen still growing on its face from the hills near Lyons, Colorado. They used Cor-Ten steel for the structural frame, a material designed to weather in place and develop a rust-colored patina that would age alongside the stone. The profile is low and long, the roof nearly disappears against the meadow, and the mountains rise behind it.
Ground was broken in July of nineteen sixty-five. The dedication ceremony took place on June twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-seven, one year after Mission Sixty-Six's formal end. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand one and elevated to National Historic Landmark status the same year, making it one of only a few visitor centers in the National Park System to hold that designation.
