The Chapel at the Air Force Academy
Near Manitou Springs, Colorado
Seventeen aluminum spires rise from a ridge above the United States Air Force Academy campus, each one pointing at a different angle, the whole structure suggesting something between a rocket and a cathedral. From the road approaching Colorado Springs on Interstate Twenty-Five you can see them on a clear day. They are not easy to forget.
The Cadet Chapel was designed by Walter Netsch, a partner at the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. When Netsch presented his aluminum-and-glass modernist scheme to the military brass in the late nineteen fifties, the response was not enthusiastic. The Air Force leadership wanted something more traditional. There were years of revision, value-engineering, and institutional resistance. The military wanted a chapel that looked like a chapel. Netsch wanted something that looked like the modern Air Force.
The structure that was finally dedicated in nineteen sixty-two is considered one of the most significant works of mid-century modern architecture in the American West. The spires are made of one hundred aluminium tetrahedra. The stained glass between them was designed to read differently from inside than from outside. The building was declared a National Historic Landmark in two thousand four.
The Air Force Academy's interpretive materials on the chapel describe the architectural achievement in detail. They describe the engineering challenges, the controversy over the design, the dedication ceremony. What the official record does not address is Walter Netsch's personal life, which, like those of many architects working in the Cold War military-contract environment, is not well documented in the public record. The biographical facts available from architectural history focus on his career, his marriage to the Illinois politician Dawn Clark Netsch, and his design legacy. The full picture of who he was outside that record is not something the public sources establish.
What the public record does establish is that a civilian architect who refused to compromise on a vision the military opposed designed the most visited structure in Colorado Springs.
