The Air Force Academy: Modernism and Mission in the Rockies
Near Manitou Springs, Colorado
The United States Air Force Academy sits seven miles north of Colorado Springs on a tract of land chosen as much for its symbolism as its geography, with the front range of the Rockies rising behind it and the plains stretching east toward the horizon. It is the youngest of the service academies, and its founding story reflects how late the nation came to accept air power as a discipline equal to land and sea warfare.
Congress authorized a separate Air Force Academy on April first, nineteen fifty-four, six years after the Air Force itself became an independent service. The first class enrolled in the summer of nineteen fifty-five at temporary quarters at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver while the permanent campus was designed and built. The academy moved to its Colorado Springs site in nineteen fifty-eight.
The campus that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill designed is a masterwork of mid-century modernism, all clean lines and glass and concrete laid against the mountains. Its centerpiece is the Cadet Chapel, completed in nineteen sixty-two and dedicated in nineteen sixty-three, a structure that caused a genuine controversy when its designs were first unveiled. Seventeen aluminum spires, each formed from interlocking tetrahedrons seventy-five feet long, rise one hundred fifty feet above a granite pediment. Critics called it garish, un-American, and inappropriate for a military institution. In time it became one of the most recognizable pieces of American architecture of its era, and in two thousand four the entire cadet area received National Historic Landmark status. The chapel remains the most visited landmark in Colorado.
The academy graduates roughly nine hundred officers per year. Notable alumni include astronauts, cabinet secretaries, and nearly every senior Air Force commander of the past half-century. The institution occupies nearly eighteen thousand acres and houses a complete community of academic buildings, athletic facilities, and a preparatory school, all within a setting that announces, from the moment you see it, that the Air Force Academy was built to look permanent.
