I.M. Pei Looked at Mesa Verde First
Near Boulder, Colorado
The mesa above Boulder drops away on three sides, and from its edge you can see the town below, the Flatirons rising behind it, and on clear days the eastern plains stretching to what seems like the edge of the continent. The building at the top of this mesa looks as if it grew from the rock. That was the intention.
When the federal government chose Boulder as the site for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in nineteen sixty, they hired the architect I.M. Pei to design it. Pei was not a man who worked from generic forms. Before he drew a line for the NCAR building, he drove to Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado and spent time studying the Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings: the stone towers, the textured surfaces, the way the structures met the landscape without apologizing for being there. When the building opened in nineteen sixty-seven, the brutalist concrete forms, the towers, the rough pinkish stone aggregate, were understood immediately to be in dialogue with a tradition a thousand years old.
The federal investment in Boulder was substantial, approximately forty million dollars in Cold War dollars, and it was deliberate. The government wanted to distribute scientific research capacity away from the coasts, partly for Cold War reasons related to nuclear vulnerability, and partly because Boulder had built the kind of university environment where atmospheric scientists were already gathering. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of research universities, had lobbied successfully for Boulder as the site.
Years earlier, in nineteen sixty-two, the agency that became the National Institute of Standards and Technology had already brought research programs here from Washington, and its joint lab with the University of Colorado went on to produce Nobel Prize-winning physicists on a campus that had been primarily a regional state school two decades before. Boulder went from college town to science cluster in roughly the time it takes a child to grow up.
The building at the top of the mesa was both the symbol and the engine of that transformation.
