Colorado's landscape dwarfs its architecture. The eastern high plains, massive central mountains, and western canyons are dramatic settings for buildings. Even the metropolitan strip along the eastern base of the Rockies, where three-fourths of all 3.9 million Coloradans reside, is overshadowed by lofty peaks on the western horizon and fringed on the east by an immense, lonely prairie.
Colorado's 104,247 square miles make it the nation's eighth largest state. If only it could be ironed out flat, Coloradans quip, it would be bigger than Texas. Coloradans are used to a lot of elbow room in their homes, their work places, and their play places. A third of the state is federal land, much of it recreational. This spaciousness is reflected in the architecture: detached single-family housing predominates even in the poorest urban neighborhoods. Outside the cities, residential subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks sprawl as if there were no end to the land.
Coloradans have rarely recognized natural obstacles to development. They have built in the most hostile environments, where gold, silver, or other natural resources lie. Little of the landscape remains virginal. Roads scale remote and rugged mountains and penetrate isolated prairie and canyon lands. Landscapes are branded not only by roads, but also by railroads, irrigation ditches, power lines, and barbed wire.
With an average elevation of 6,800 feet, Colorado is the highest state. Its backbone, the Rocky Mountains, soars two miles high, with fifty-three peaks over 14,000 feet. The elevation contributes to a climate of extremes—heat waves and sudden cold snaps, high winds and heavy snow loads—which challenge architects. Colorado homes generally have basements which provide both winter warmth and summer coolness. Building codes specify foundations at least three feet deep to reach below the frost line. Architects are also challenged by soils, which range from sandy, melting types to expanding bentonite clay that can wreck foundations.
Dryness—the average annual precipitation is only about seventeen inches—has also influenced Colorado buildings. Much of the state is treeless, and even mountain forests do not produce high-grade hardwoods. So Coloradans have often built with sod, adobe, clay brick, and native stone: granite, limestone, marble, rhyolite, and sandstone. Colorado's expansive, high, dry, sunny environment warrants a special architecture, but Coloradans generally have borrowed styles from elsewhere that are no match for the climate or the setting. This architecture, like settlement generally, is concentrated in the four major river valleys—the South Platte, the Arkansas, the Rio Grande, and the Colorado.
Native Americans
The first builders in the river valleys were Native Americans who used the materials, contours, and colors of the earth. Exactly who these people were, and when and where they first constructed shelters in Colorado, will never be known. Archaeologists are continually finding new pieces in jigsaw-puzzle portraits of prehistoric Coloradans that will never be completed.
The Clovis culture (c. 10,500–9000 B.C.) came to light after spear points were found amid mammoth skeletons at Dent, near Greeley. During the 1930s Regis College Professor Conrad Bilgery, S.J., led a team that first excavated and reported Dent's Clovis spear points, named for similar points found in Clovis, New Mexico. Archaeologists are still debating the details and significance of the scrapers, blades, hammer stones, flake knives, choppers, and bone tools also found at Dent. Alluvial activity has greatly disturbed the site, erasing evidence of whatever shelters these prehistoric peoples may have erected.
The Folsom culture (c. 9000–c. 8000 B.C.) created the distinctive fluted spear points first found south of the Colorado border in Folsom, New Mexico. The Lindenmeier Ranch site, Colorado's most important Folsom find, was a camp and Bison antiquuskill site unearthed in 1924. At the Zapata Ranch, just south of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, archaeologist Dennis Stanford is trying to reconstruct the configuration of a large Folsom community.
The Plano culture (c. 8000–c. 5000 B.C.), named for discoveries on the plains of Texas, is evident in Colorado kill sites. At the ranch of Robert Jones, Jr., near Wray, archaeologists have found a wooden pole, possibly a religious structure similar to the medicine poles erected by historic Native American buffalo hunters. At various Colorado Plano sites, organized groups trapped and slaughtered entire herds, returning perennially to the same butchering and meat processing stations. Noted Colorado archaeologists such as Joe Ben Wheat and Marie Wormington have identified butchering stations separated from the kill sites. At the Jurgens camp, archaeologists also found tools for grinding seeds and nicotine-coated pipes. Early Native Americans were beginning to feel at home in Colorado, beginning to build long-term shelters.
Fremont People (A.D. 400–1200) painted these Carrot Man pictographs near Rangely in northwestern Colorado.
Prehistoric camps were not confined to the plains. At Caribou Lake, located at 11,000 feet near the Continental Divide, diggers found charcoal, projectile points, waste flakes, and a large knife. The location near Arapaho Pass suggests that Plano people moved from the plains across the high Rockies to upland valleys on their hunting and gathering expeditions.
Between roughly 6000 B.C. and A.D. 1, archaic Native Americans built shelters scattered across the state. During construction of the Colorado–Big Thompson water diversion system, reservoir and pipeline teams unearthed at least forty-two archaic sites in the sagebrush of Middle Park. Traces of firepits, charred rabbit bones, upright ponderosa logs, pine boughs, stone tools, and a jasper quarry led archaeologists to speculate that these people were more permanently settled than earlier hunter-gatherers. Archaeologists further suggested that these archaic Indians lived in wattle-and-daub jacals, constructed of upright pine posts interwoven with branches and plastered over with wet clay.
The Fremont people (c. A.D. 400–1200), named for sites discovered along Utah's Fremont River, left notable art and architecture in the northwestern corner of Colorado. They dug pit houses and constructed masonry homes, granaries, and fortifications. Fremont people fashioned distinctive gray pottery and some of Colorado's most celebrated rock art, which is best seen at Cañon Pintado, now a well-marked site on Colorado 139 about 12 miles south of Rangely.
While archaeologists focus on what they find at Colorado's many prehistoric sites, architectural historians may be interested in the intricate earth excavations done by the archaeologists themselves. At a few places such as the commercial Crow Canyon dig near Dolores, any and all are welcome—for a fee—to observe or to participate in excavations. These excavations are themselves earth sculptures, works of art routinely covered over and hidden.
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Who does not remember the interest with which when young we looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave.… The savage owns his shelter because it costs so little, while in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter.” Unfortunately, no examples of Colorado's oldest extant architecture—Native American rock shelters—have been converted to house museums, but rock shelters were the ancestors of pit houses and elaborate cliff dwellings and pueblo villages. The greatest extant Native American architectural achievements in the United States are the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park in the southwestern corner of Colorado, the first park devoted to preserving the architectural ruins of a prehistoric people, the Anasazi (Navajo for “ancient ones” or “ancient enemies”). Mesa Verde was also the first World Heritage Site in the United States, so designated in 1978 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Between A.D. 1 and 1300, the Anasazi built mud and masonry habitations, first on mesa tops, then in recesses eroded into canyon walls. The cliff villages of Mesa Verde are the best known of many such dwellings scattered throughout Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. These settlements sometimes sheltered several hundred people in structures as high as four stories. The cultural and architectural achievements of the Mesa Verde builders have been compared by architectural historian Vincent J. Scully and others with those of medieval European city builders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The novelist Willa Cather likened Mesa Verde's black-on-white pottery to that of ancient Greece. Although thousands of scholarly reports have surveyed the cliff dwellings, no one has captured their magic as vividly as Cather, in her novel The Professor's House (1925):
Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was as still as sculpture—and something like that. It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower. It was beautifully proportioned, that tower, swelling out to a large girth a little above the base, then growing slender again. There was something symmetrical and powerful about the swell of the masonry. The tower was the fine thing that held all the jumble of houses together and made them mean something.
Cliff Palace is the largest of the stone cities preserved in Mesa Verde National Park.
The Anasazi were cultivators of corn and other crops as well as hunters and gatherers of food. Their remarkably stable and long-lived culture rested on their building abilities. Faced with a dry climate, the Anasazi developed dams and ditches, clay vessels, and stone cisterns. Despite their water-conscious building and culture, the drought of 1275–1300 probably forced them to evacuate their cliff cities. They moved to, among other places, the Rio Grande Valley to build the pueblos still occupied by their descendants.
While the Anasazi culture is enshrined at Mesa Verde, prehistoric Plains Indians left less to inspect. Known sites include caves, rock shelters, pit houses, and earth lodges. Burial sites, sometimes containing multiple corpses and grave offerings, have been discovered in various places, including Denver's suburban subdivisions. Historic Plains Indians, such as the Arapaho and Cheyenne, often used a portable architecture of buffalo hides and pine poles. Only a few tipi rings—either functional or ceremonial—survive as stone circles near Cowdrey in Jackson County, Keota in Weld County, and Virginia Dale in Larimer County. The Utes or their predecessors constructed rectangles, circles, or semicircles made of a course or two of stone that may have been vision quest sites. Circular stone bunkers found in high places were built so Native Americans could crouch under brush and bait to catch eagles for their much-prized feathers.
Historical accounts of Native Americans were first recorded in the 1600s with the Spanish explorations of present-day Colorado. The Spanish reported settlements such as El Quartelejo along the Arkansas River, where Plains Apaches lived in villages and cultivated corn, squash, beans, melons, and sunflowers. The Apaches constructed lodges by making round and rectangular earth pits with posts holding up roofs of brush and mud. During the 1700s the Apache, along with the Comanche, began moving south out of Colorado as Cheyenne and Arapaho pushed in from the east. The Arapaho and Cheyenne occupied eastern Colorado from around 1800 until the 1860s, when they were forced onto reservations in Montana, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.
Since the 1880s only two tribes have had Colorado reservations: the Ute Mountain Utes and the Southern Utes. The Utes, who have inhabited the state for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, adapted to the extremes of Colorado climate by developing leather clothing and by using seasonal shelter: tipis for winter and open wood and brush wickiups for summer. Today the Ute Mountain Ute and the Southern Ute reservations, in the southwestern corner of Colorado, are the only refuges left for Native Americans in a state which once hosted not only the Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Comanche, but also the Kiowa, Pawnee, Shoshone, and other tribes.
Ute wickiup, photographed by John K. Hillers, with the John Wesley Powell expedition, in 1873
Hispanic Roots
Hispanics, as the mestizopeoples carrying both Spanish and Native American blood often call themselves, were the first Euro-Americans to erect structures in a state they christened. They named it for the muddy red color of its major river, the Colorado (Spanish for red, ruddy, or embarrassed). Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and adventurers explored parts of southern Colorado during the Spanish Colonial period, beginning with Don Juan de Oñate's 1598 settlement of the lower Rio Grande River valley. Two Franciscan friars, Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, made the most important expedition in 1776. They mapped Colorado for the first time, and Fray Escalante provided a full report, mentioning Anasazi ruins and the “tents,” “huts,” and “tiny dwellings” of the Utes.
Discouraged by the dry plains and canyon lands and forbidding mountains, the Spanish did not attempt to colonize the lands that now make up Colorado. Only after the Mexican Revolution of 1821 did Hispanic pioneers settle the San Luis Valley, along the upper Rio Grande. To encourage agricultural settlement, the Mexican government made five large land grants in or near the San Luis Valley. Small adobe plaza towns were established, first along the Culebra River, where San Luis (1851) claims to be the state's oldest permanent town.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended the Mexican-American War, promised U.S. citizenship and property rights to Mexican Americans. In spite of the treaty, much of their property passed into the hands of Anglo settlers. Frequently Anglo town founders ignored previously existing Hispanic communities. Denver, for instance, dates its origins to an 1858 gold strike by U.S. citizens rather than to an 1857 claim known as Mexican Diggings. Yankees did not think much of the indigenous Mexican communities. Francis Parkman, for example, derided Mexican “mud” buildings in his classic, The Oregon Trail (1849). Discussing El Pueblo, the 1840s nucleus of the modern city of Pueblo, Parkman, a proper Bostonian, called it “a wretched species of fort, of most primitive construction, being nothing more than a large square enclosure, surrounded by a wall of mud, miserably cracked and dilapi-dated.…”
Other Yankees expressed similar contempt for Hispanic architecture. Delta, a town in west central Colorado, built its first schoolhouse out of adobe, but the pioneers dipped each brick into red paint to make it look like a Yankee brick. Denver passed ordinances requiring that bricks be kiln-fired and measure no more than 8 1/4 by 4 1/16 by 2 1/4 inches. Such laws discouraged the use of traditional sun-dried adobe bricks, which measure roughly 12 by 3 by 6 inches. Such discrimination, intentional or not, discouraged Hispanic building traditions.
A few U.S. citizens had a higher opinion of adobe. Charles and William Bent, two St. Louis traders operating on the Santa Fe Trail, admired structures in New Mexico and used adobe to construct Bent's Old Fort on the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado. This prairie castle measured 142 by 122 feet and had adobe walls 2 feet thick and 15 feet high. As the regional trade center of the 1830s and 1840s for French, Indian, Mexican, and U.S. trappers and traders, Bent's Old Fort became a model for later structures, ranging from forts on the South Platte to The Fort, a 1960s adobe restaurant in Morrison. The National Park Service reconstructed Bent's Old Fort in 1976 and, like the Bents, used adobe and skilled Hispanic laborers.
Adobe buildings were traditionally organized around plazas, none of which survive intact in southern Colorado. Rail and auto age developments have left only adobe remnants, subjected in many cases to later alterations, ranging from gable roofs to solar panels. Many adobe walls now wear new skins of concrete, stucco, tarpaper, wood, or metal siding.
Town plaza of Garcia in the Rio Grande Valley, photographed by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration, 1940
After 1900 the architecture of Native Americans and Hispanics gained greater respectability. Pueblo and Mission revival, Spanish Colonial, and Territorial styles became the choice for some of the state's finest residential neighborhoods, such as the Broadmoor area in Colorado Springs and Denver's Country Club area. Indigenous southwestern architecture inspired I. M. Pei's National Center for Atmospheric Research (1966) in Boulder. It is clad in bush-hammered exposed aggregate of concrete mixed with the local reddish soil and stone to capture natural colors and textures in modern-day “mud.”
Mining-Era Architecture
A different architectural tradition arrived in Colorado beginning with the 1858–1859 gold rush. Although it is stereotyped as Anglo immigration because English-speaking, U.S.-born immigrants predominated, the westward movement was multicultural. In Colorado, German-speaking peoples were the most prevalent nineteenth-century foreign-born group, intermingled with Canadians, English, French, Irish, Scandinavians, Scots, Welsh, Chinese, and others. A few African Americans arrived with the fur trade, cattle drives, and mineral rushes, but many more came with the railroads after 1870. After 1890 southern and eastern Europeans, especially Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Slavs, became more numerous, while Mexicans comprised the largest single immigrant stream by the 1930s.
As this 1879 view of Leadville suggests, many mining towns sprang up without benefit of planning.
Most fortune seekers rushing into Colorado after the 1858–1859 gold strikes built as quickly and cheaply as possible. They used canvas, dirt, and logs from cottonwoods, the only common native tree on Colorado's eastern plains. Under broad-leaved cottonwoods, argonauts (named for Jason and the other sailors of the Argo, who sought the Golden Fleece in Greek mythology) camped, socialized, and slept. To build houses, the pioneers used cottonwood logs for walls and draped cottonwood ridgepoles with split saplings. They piled on sod to complete the roof. When rain or snow fell, muddy water might drip for days indoors, and roofs bloomed with wildflowers.
Saloons epitomized frontier-era structures. As the first and most common public buildings on the Euro-American frontier, they often housed pioneer local governments. Saloons also doubled as theaters, art galleries, and dance halls and even housed church services. Some barkeepers graduated to spiffier structures boasting the finest fixtures in towns—classical mirrored-back bars, plate glass windows, and corbeled brick fronts. This saloon hall legacy was largely erased by the Prohibition era and the tendency of preservationists to save more “respectable” buildings.
Stagecoach stops, another common pioneer building type, have fared better. Many communities have preserved their hewn log stage stops. Denver's Four Mile House and Grand County's Cozens House are particularly well-preserved museum specimens. These and other surviving stage houses typify the tendency of later residents to dress up log buildings with clapboard siding and Carpenter's Gothic trim.
Western Mining Corporation, Centennial Mine, Georgetown, by Muriel Sibell Wolle (crayon and watercolor, 12 by 15 1/2 inches) depicts one of many now-vanished mining structures captured in this prolific artist's work between the 1920s and her death in 1977.
Log and frame construction dominated early mountain mining towns. Ernest Ingersoll, an eastern journalist who enlisted with the U.S. Geological Survey party mapping Colorado in 1874, wrote in his 1882 bestseller, Knocking around the Rockies:
The miners hastily throw up little log cabins, six or eight logs high, covered with a roof of poles and dirt, and having nothing better than the hard-tramped earth for a floor. In one end is the fireplace (the chimney is outside, like that of a negro's hut in the South), and at the other end are rough bunks, where the owner stuffs in some long grass or spruce boughs or straw, and spreads his bed or blankets. These rude little cabins are packed close together up and down the sides of the gulch, so as to be as near as possible to, and yet out of the way of, the mining.… I have known of such a gulch-mining settlement [Leadville] in a single year converting an utter wilderness in the mountains, long miles away from anywhere, into a city of ten thousand, or more.
Miners transformed the landscape radically. Isabella L. Bird, an English world traveler, painted a dark but accurate picture in A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879):
Mining destroys and devastates, turning the earth inside out, making it hideous and blighting every green thing, as it usually blights man's heart and soul. There was mining everywhere … with all its destruction and devastation, its digging, burrowing, gulching and sluicing; and up all along the seemingly inaccessible heights were holes with their roofs log supported, in which solitary and patient men were selling their lives for treasure.
The Federal Mining Law of 1872, which is still in effect, regards mining as the highest and best use of public lands. If miners make certain minimal improvements they may “patent” (i.e., purchase) their claims. Mining claims, given grandfather protection even within wilderness areas, pay no royalty for their use of public lands. Giving miners a free hand has left Colorado with some unnatural wonders, such as collapsed Bartlett Mountain, with its innards oozing down Fremont Pass. Its miles of molybdenum mill waste and settling ponds for the Climax Molybdenum Mine, the largest and richest in Colorado, have buried the mining towns of Robinson and Kokomo.
Mining towns usually sprang up along creeks where someone found placer gold. Placer (surface) claims often fronted on the creek and stretched uphill in rectangles, establishing an unplanned pattern followed by mines and mills, then residences and businesses. In mining towns—and mining supply towns such as Denver—local governments struggled to stop private citizens from erecting structures in public thoroughfares. One of the first ordinances passed by “The Peoples Government of Denver” in 1861 outlawed “the occupancy of any of the streets, levees or alleys set apart for the use of the public, and also the erection of buildings in the center of Cherry Creek.… Such possession by individuals of public property is an infringement upon the rights of the community.…” This granddaddy of all Denver ordinances was the first of many laws passed to address an ongoing struggle between public and private interests over the location, size, and use of buildings.
Miners founded many Colorado towns and extracted billions in gold, silver, coal, oil, zinc, lead, molybdenum, and other minerals. If gold and silver mining camps prospered, they generally evolved from log and frame to brick and stone. Masonry construction was required in commercial cores after fires destroyed many first-generation wooden buildings. Despite the fortunes taken out of these towns, most of them are gone today. They were “git-and-git-out” towns, places to try to make a fortune and then push on. Some towns were torn done for scrap or to avoid taxes on abandoned buildings. Only traces of streets and foundations remain amid the scars of deforestation, mine tailings, and hazardous wastes. Other towns have been victims of weather, fire, or vandalism. Ghost town prowling has become a favorite hobby of Coloradans, and to avoid disappointing tourists, the U.S. Forest Service has stabilized several ghost towns such as Ashcroft and Independence in Pitkin County. Unfortunately, the Forest Service has also burned down towns to discourage squatters on public lands.
In some “ghost towns,” mining camp structures have been converted to vacation homes. Such frame dwellings helped inspire a contemporary style that architectural historian David Gebhard named “Mineshaft Modern.” Asymmetrical compositions, frequently executed in raw wood with shed roofs; strong, spare lines; and diagonal and vertical patterns characterize this style. Mineshaft Modern log homes likewise are variations on the log tradition introduced by miners.
The ghost town of Ashcroft, shown in a Farm Security Administration photograph taken in 1941 by Marion Post Wolcott. was partially reconstructed during the 1980s by the U.S. Forest Service and the Aspen Historical Society.
The Rush to Respectability
During its Native American and Hispanic eras, Colorado remained sparsely populated. The gold and silver rushes after 1858 brought tremendous growth as some 100,000 fortune seekers arrived in Colorado within a few years. A majority became disappointed “go-backs,” but enough stayed to justify establishment of Colorado Territory in 1861. After the railroads arrived in 1870 Colorado boomed, becoming the thirty-eighth state in 1876. The population jumped from 34,277 in 1860 to 412, 198 in 1890.
Frank E. Edbrooke, Colorado's leading nineteenth-century architect, was caricatured in The Rocky Mountain News, 1909, by Frank “Doc Bird” Finch.
Frank E. and Willoughby J. Edbrooke designed Denver's grandest lost landmark, the Tabor Grand Opera House, at 16th and Curtis streets.
During the flush times between 1870 and the silver crash of 1893, a fourth architectural period emerged—the rush to respectability. Coloradans exported pay dirt and imported architects, hoping to catch up with the eastern United States and Europe in matters of taste and refinement. Mining millionaires demanded elegant mansions in fashionable neighborhoods. They frequently left the crude mining towns where they made their fortunes for cities such as Denver and Colorado Springs. There, the mining kings and queens sought architectural refinements to help distinguish themselves from run-of-the-mill miners.
Vernacular mining-era structures gave way in the 1870s to Italianate and other Victorian-era styles. Frame false fronts evolved into elaborate brick facades and metal cornices. Coloradans built modish mansions and commercial blocks, lavishing money on fine masonry, fancy wood-work, and cast iron facades. The Denver Mansions Company, organized by English and Scottish investors in 1878, undertook to satisfy the need for fine homes and commercial structures in Colorado's Queen City. It constructed Denver's first fine hotel, the Windsor, and a pretentious adjacent office block, the Barclay.
Leadville's silver king, Horace A. W. Tabor, exemplified Colorado's rush to respectability. He gave that silver city its Tabor Opera House and Vendome Hotel, then moved to Denver after his 1879 election as lieutenant governor. As Tabor recalled later, “Denver was not building good buildings and I thought I would do something toward setting them a good example.” Tabor went to Chicago to interview prospective architects and selected Willoughby J. Edbrooke. Although Tabor initially balked at Edbrooke's $4,500 fee, Willoughby and his brother Frank came to Denver from Chicago in 1879 to design the Tabor Grand Opera House and the Tabor Block. Willoughby soon moved on to design buildings at the University of Notre Dame, the U.S. Government Building for the World's Columbian Exposition, and the Old Post Office in Washington, D.C. Frank stayed to become Colorado's premier nineteenth-century architect. He brought mainstream design influenced by the work of H. H. Richardson and technical achievements such as the steel skeleton skyscraper.
Edbrooke and other architects arriving during the flush 1880s designed fine residences for the moneyed class, who favored Victorian styles and tried to outdo their neighbors by piling on more ornament. The rush to respectability gave Colorado elaborate structures of locally manufactured bricks and locally quarried stone, which made imported, eclectic building designs seem more at home.
Schools, Churches, and Hotels
Schoolhouses were often the first attempt at community cooperation and respectability. Their construction required collective effort, public expenditure, and a consensus on the geographical boundaries of a school district, as Andrew Gulliford points out in America's Country Schoolhouses (1990). Schoolhouses also served as lessons in good design, beginning with frame one-room buildings with classical detailing and symmetry. If hamlets prospered, one-room schools evolved into multi-story masonry showpieces. During the 1930s New Deal building programs constructed “PWA Moderne” schools in innumerable communities. When Colorado began consolidating schools in the 1950s, many smaller ones closed. Some were recycled for other community uses, such as museums or community centers.
Churches, the most visible sign of civility in raw western communities, commonly started by holding services in taverns and other public halls, then struggled to build their own small houses of worship. Communities and congregations that prospered erected the stylish, architect-designed masonry churches that still anchor most towns.
Catholic churches, characteristically with crosses atop steeples, spires, and gable ends, tended to Romanesque, Lombard, and Gothic Revival styles. Even adobe churches in southern Colorado generally incorporated, or later added, Romanesque or Gothic elements. The church often became the hub of a parish complex composed of a rectory, a school, a convent, and, in a dozen Colorado towns, a hospital. The bishop in Denver nominally controlled the building and design of Catholic churches, but not until the arrival of Bishop Urban J. Vehr in the 1940s were tight architectural guidelines imposed. Vehr retained one of Colorado's most polished architects, Jules Jacques Benois (Jacques) Benedict, to design brick or stone structures which borrowed, in the Beaux-Arts manner, from the great church styles of Italy, France, and Germany.
Episcopalians commissioned prominent architects to build exquisite, often understated, traditional chapels for their congregations. Sometimes Episcopal parishes hired nationally noted architects, such as Ralph Adams Cram, who designed St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Denver. Baptists, following national church board recommendations, favored Georgian Revival churches. A church architectural team in Salt Lake City designed for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints crisp, light-colored structures in a version of Moderne that resembled streamlined Colonial or Georgian Revival styles. Methodists and Presbyterians had more local autonomy and used a wide range of styles, often in vernacular versions.
Churches tended to be traditional, to be “churchy.” This stylistic predilection was understandable during the nineteenth century, when churches were seen as the salvation of a godless Rocky Mountain mining frontier. The wilder and more remote the settlement, the more some people—especially women—hungered for houses of prayer such as those they had known in their former homes.
Hispanics and Irish, French and Germans, Scandinavians and Italians often built with memories of their favorite churches in the old country. Jews, coming from a migratory tradition, felt freer to experiment with new and different styles. Their Colorado synagogues ranged from Byzantine Revival, like Temple Aaron in Trinidad, to expressive contemporary forms like Denver's Temple Emanuel.
Churches frequently aspired to architectural grandeur and became neighborhood landmarks. First-generation simple log or masonry churches generally were replaced with finer ones that have endured, probably more often than any other building type. Landmark churches characterize practically every urban neighborhood and rural town. In many small towns, the most endearing building is the little white frame church. Since World War II, houses of worship have become much more avant-garde, allowing architects considerable creativity with new structural methods, materials, and design.
Hotels exhibited not only the latest architectural styles, but also technological advances and new creature comforts. Between the 1880s and the 1920s Coloradans built their grand hotels: the Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs, the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, the Oxford and the Brown Palace in Denver, the Strater in Durango, and the Jerome in Aspen. Such palaces of the public were open to all for haircuts and shoeshines, drinks and gourmet meals in sumptuous surroundings. Inside, everyone could gawk at such wonders as elevators and telephones, hot water showers and flush toilets. Architectural advances such as the steel skeleton and the skylighted atrium lobby were introduced by Frank Edbrooke's Brown Palace Hotel (1892). Between the 1930s and the 1950s the Brown Palace installed the latest marvel—central air conditioning—using the old fireplaces, smoke ducts, and chimney network. Before the advent of the subdivision show home, hotels set the pace for domestic design. After seeing the latest gadgets and design innovations, Coloradans began asking architects to incorporate these marvels in houses.
Cemeteries and Parks
“Of all monuments,” Eugène-Emanuel Viollet-le-Duc once observed, “tombs present perhaps the broadest subject for study.” Structures for the dead reveal much about the living. Mortuaries, mausoleums, and cemetery parks all strove to provide an elegant, tranquil final neighborhood for a footloose citizenry that hungered for stability and status but rarely found it during their lifetimes.
Mortuaries, an overlooked building type, frequently settle into a community's grand old mansion, like the Hood Mortuary, which moved into the Amy Mansion, Durango's Shingle Style showcase. Long before law firms and other small businesses began adapting large older homes as offices, mortuaries reused them for new commercial purposes. These “funeral homes” laid out corpses in the “funeral parlor” as earlier generations had laid out their dead for viewing in private homes.
Before the 1920s only the wealthiest could afford private mausoleums. During that decade, Americans developed new death styles as well as lifestyles and began to fancy communal mausoleums. From Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, the fashion swept into the provinces. The new mode of interment was explored by a short-lived Denver magazine, The Echo, which aspired to be The New Yorkerof the Rockies:
A too blind adherence to the Bible, which remarks that dust to dust returneth, engendered in humanity the misbelief that inhumation in the earth itself was the one divinely appointed means of human sepulcher.… In the midst of presentiments of the grandeur of the twenty-first century, the human mind is awakening to the singular repellance of interment in the earth.
Elaborating on how magnificent the final homes of humans could be, The Echonoted in this November 1926 piece that although many “community mausoleums” existed elsewhere in the United States, Colorado had none. Responding to the call, Crown Hill Cemetery erected a seven-story “Tower of Memories” in the Denver suburb of Wheat Ridge. This communal mausoleum, a bit of severe classical eclecticism reminiscent of the work of Bertram Goodhue, was begun in 1926, using a grand design by a Kansas City architect. Construction stalled with the 1929 stock market crash; not until 1931 was a cheaper concrete obelisk finally completed—starved classicism on a starved budget.
Denver's Fairmount Cemetery built its 1920s mausoleum more quickly and more elegantly, engaging Denver architects Mountjoy and Frewen to design a Greek temple clad in Colorado Yule marble. Such Neoclassical design prevails in Fairmount Cemetery, largest and grandest of Colorado's cities of the dead. Cemeteries prized various revival styles, ranging from Fairmount's exquisite French Gothic chapel to obelisks and private mausoleums in the Egyptian Revival mode.
Most large Colorado cemeteries borrowed from the 1831 cemetery park prototype, Mount Auburn, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The concept of a cemetery as a spacious landscape rather than a crowded boneyard quickly became popular in a spacious state whose citizens were keen on elbow room. Of more than 2,000 Colorado burial places reported in the Colorado Cemetery Directory (1985), most are spacious rural plots, often now overgrown by tumbleweed or aspen. Fading wooden slabs have grown indecipherable. But the state's great, well-maintained urban cemetery parks, such as Fairmount, Mount Olivet, and Riverside in Denver; Roselawn in Pueblo; Lynn Grove in Fort Collins; and Evergreen in Colorado Springs, are splendid places to study traditional styles. Tomb-Stones and mausoleums often are the well-thought-out and well-designed final monuments of the moneyed class, who saw themselves as guardians of fine taste in a world corrupted by modern design.
Jewish cemeteries, such as Mount Nebo in Aurora and the Emanuel Section of Fairmount, offer tombstone tributes in Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, and contemporary styles. Cemetery sculptures, often beautiful compositions trying to capture grief, hope, and love, distinguish even small funeral grounds. In recent decades, both mausoleums and upright headstones have fallen out of fashion, as cemeteries encourage flat grave markers and sparsely landscaped grassy plots that can be trimmed with power mowers. Americans now commonly choose cremation or mausoleum storage compartments resembling the cubicles in high-rise apartment houses.
Frank E. Edbrooke's final design may have been his own mausoleum at Fairmount Cemetery in Denver.
Cemeteries mirror their communities. Hilltop mausoleum mansions of the elite echo the millionaire's rows where they lived. The poorest people lie in unmarked, low-lying potters' fields. Denver's African American population, concentrated in the northeast quadrant of the metropolis in life, is also consigned to that corner of Fairmount Cemetery. Jews, who once clustered in West Denver's Little Israel neighborhood, have reconvened in the Emanuel Section along the western edge of Fairmount. Other ethnic groups, often by choice, cluster in cemetery sections, where their languages may survive on the tomb-stones.
Cemeteries, as John Sears notes in Sacred Places (1989) became models for private suburbs and public parks. Planners drew inspiration from the winding paths and carriage drives, from landscaping designed for privacy and quiet, and from naturalistic settings that encouraged noble sentiments. By imposing tight design guidelines on construction, landscaping, and behavior, cemeteries also became a prototype for better zoning, an argument for forcing individuals to respect community standards and the common good.
Park planner George Kessler's boulevard, park, and parkway plan for Denver, 1907
Cemeteries served as the first public parks, and to this day Fairmount Cemetery remains the state's largest arboretum. Not until after 1900 and the spread of the City Beautiful movement did many Colorado towns begin to set aside formal parks. Several cities, including Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver, and Trinidad, developed extensive mountain parks to augment their city parks. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., worked in Boulder, which named one park for him. Olmsted, the country's first professor of landscape architecture, also worked for Denver and surveyed on horseback the foothills where he helped to design Denver's mountain park system.
National parks were established at Mesa Verde (1906) and Rocky Mountain (1915). Along with national monuments, forests, grasslands, and wilderness areas, the federal playgrounds occupy almost a fifth of the state. Many local and national parks remained raw land until the 1930s, when the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) teams constructed roads, trails, shelters, toilets, and other amenities. The CCC helped complete Red Rocks Outdoor Amphitheater and the Winter Park Ski Area for the Denver Mountain Parks. City and federal parks were belatedly joined by state parks. The Colorado Parks and Outdoor Recreation Department, established in 1955, now maintains more than forty parks and recreation areas statewide.
To connect parks and to showcase elite residential districts, some communities also built parkways. George Kessler, the Kansas City parkway master planner, designed a network of Denver parkways with generous green medians and extravagant setbacks. Saco R. DeBoer, a Dutch immigrant, implemented many park and parkway plans and worked as a landscape architect and community planner throughout Colorado. Even before the City Beautiful concept of parkways became popular, many towns constructed irrigation ditches and transplanted local cottonwood, ponderosa pine, blue spruce, or other species to create tree-lined streets. By the 1880s nurseries and mail-order catalogs offered a full range of plant material that could survive Colorado's erratically late and early frosts.
Town Plans
Many Colorado communities were established by railroads acting through subsidiary land development companies that refined the art of town planning, platting, and promotion. Although the Denver Pacific, Kansas Pacific, and Union Pacific received land grants in Colorado, most other railroads did not. This led lines like the Denver & Rio Grande (D&RG) to establish towns to help finance construction and maintenance.
General William J. Palmer of the D&RG acquired a 10,000-acre site for Colorado Springs and produced a promotional brochure to attract well-to-do settlers. Palmer promised that the Colorado Springs Company would use profits from land sales “to pay for all public improvements upon the property such as irrigation ditches, public buildings, ornamenting grounds, opening and improving streets and all other improvements of a permanent character.” Colorado Springs started out with one of Colorado's best-planned plats; land near the tracks was set aside for Monument Valley Park and a cemetery (later moved because boosters said it gave railroad arrivals the wrong impression). Palmer and the D&RG also gave land for Alamo and Arcadia parks, for a county courthouse, and for schools.
Most railroads and affiliated land companies, however, did not provide all the services and amenities promised. Those were left to struggling local governments to finance after the railroad and its promoters had pushed on to the next town down the line. Railroad builders were less interested in providing amenities than in procuring land, cash, and other concessions before laying track into any given community. As railroads were the key to prosperity, if not survival, communities offered incentives. Although some town plats initially showed public squares, parks, and generous sites for government buildings and schools, these were generally just window dressing. Even the most essential element of public infrastructure—irrigation ditches—was generally left for private citizens to build. Infant town and county governments struggled to find meeting halls, usually renting space until reluctant and transient populations submitted to financing more elegant and permanent public buildings.
Colorado and other western states were shaped by the federal land ordinances of 1785 and 1789. These federal laws divided the American West into townships of 36 square miles, with each square-mile section containing 640 acres. Quarter-section homesteads of 160 acres are still the basic land unit of many farms and ranches. Even the boundaries of Colorado reflect abstract grid lines drawn in Washington, D.C., rather than determined by natural features. Within the rectangular boundaries of the state, many counties are also rectangles. Nearly every community is a grid. Only in a few of the most vertical mountain mining communities, such as Central City, did nature force town builders to bend their plans. Town grids are repeated in blocks and building lots, in the siting of buildings, and usually in building floor plans. Even the last dwelling places—cemeteries—often succumbed to the economics of the checkerboard.
Grid plans appealed to railroad builders, promoters, and government agents because they made a town instantly comprehensible even to distant buyers and speculators and enabled newcomers quickly to find their way around. In these predictable town plans, street names were often limited to numbers and letters. Main Street typically began at the depot and ran perpendicular to the tracks. On the two parallel streets flanking the tracks were grain elevators, factories, and warehouses. Planned residential areas were platted several blocks away, while shanties, saloons, liveries, and other less reputable structures sprang up close to the tracks.
Blocks in Colorado towns normally measured about 400 by 300 feet, with individual lots 25 feet wide and 125 feet deep. Streets were wide (80 to 100 feet) and alleys narrow (14 to 16 feet). All blocks were generally the same size, with no distinction between commercial and residential. This homogeneity blurred the line between uses to the advantage of town boosters, who hoped that growth would allow commercial and industrial uses easily to displace residential ones. This readiness to sacrifice residential character for “higher and better” uses continues to characterize Colorado communities. Many of Denver's residential neighborhoods, for instance, are zoned to facilitate commercial or multifamily development. Some 13,000 single-family Denver homes sit on land zoned to allow high-rise construction.
Railroads, Automobiles, and Airplanes
Transportation—railroads, automobiles, and airplanes—has shaped the landscape and buildings of Colorado, an isolated state of vast distances and physical obstacles. Swarms of miners first clawed trails into the mountains, sometimes using Indian paths. Miners were followed by toll road builders, then stagecoachers. By 1900 railroads criss-crossed Colorado, ascending even 14,110-foot Pikes Peak and descending into the 1,055-foot-deep Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River.
More than any other nineteenth-century phenomenon, railroads explain the location and development of Colorado communities. In the dry, inland West, the railroad station—not the riverfront or the seaport—is the community nucleus. America's first transcontinental railroads bypassed Colorado and its two-mile-high Rocky Mountain barrier. When railroads did not come to them, Coloradans built to the railroads. Residents donated cash, materials, and labor to construct the Denver Pacific in 1870, giving Denver a lifeline to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the Union Pacific main line.
Other railroads followed. The Kansas Pacific chugged into Denver from Kansas City and St. Louis. The Colorado Central and the Denver & Rio Grande, two pioneer narrow-gauge roads, tapped mountain mining communities. The Union Pacific (UP); Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (now Burlington Northern); Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe (Santa Fe); and Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific (Rock Island) built to Denver. Thanks to its spiderweb of steel, the Mile High City emerged as the metropolis of the Rockies by tapping a vast Rocky Mountain and High Plains hinterland. Colorado's other population centers were lesser rail hubs.
To tackle difficult terrain, railroaders used 3-foot-wide narrow-gauge track instead of standard (4-foot, 8-inch) gauge. Narrow-gauge track was cheaper to lay and could handle tighter curves and steeper grades. In climbing the Rockies, railroaders built spectacular tunnels, trestles, and bridges, such as the Georgetown Loop and the Moffat Tunnel, that are among Colorado's noteworthy landmarks.
Railroads shaped the built environment, from the industrial, urbanized corridor along the tracks to agricultural hamlets where discarded boxcars still serve as farm and ranch outbuildings. They introduced new architectural materials, including eastern hardwoods, cast iron fronts, and mail-order trim, to remote corners of Colorado. In cities and larger towns, street railways, as streetcars were first called, shaped growth patterns. Indeed, streetcar suburbanization established the pattern of decentralization often attributed to the automobile.
Passenger depots, and even rural freight depots, were more than commercial and social hubs. Designed by architects or railroad engineering offices, they set building standards for communities. The trains themselves were also rolling design exhibits, allowing the public to ponder such wonders as George Pullman's palace cars. A half century later, stainless steel locomotives, coaches, diners, and lounge cars of trains like the California Zephyr popularized modern design. The Zephyr, inaugurated in 1934, showcased Streamline Moderne design by Paul Philippe Cret and the Chicago firm of Holabird and Root.
Railroads transformed the landscape as well as the economy of Colorado. This 1,084-foot-long timber trestle served the Colorado Midland's Hagerman Pass route (1890s photograph by W. H. Jackson).
Automobiles have even more drastically transformed Colorado's natural landscape and built environment. Not all highways are ugly. Scenic drives in the Denver Mountain Parks, in Rocky Mountain National Park, and in Colorado National Monument are contoured to complement natural landscapes. Confronted by considerable protest from environmental groups, the Colorado Department of Transportation has made I-70 in Glenwood Canyon one of the world's most beautiful freeways.
Colorado has one of the nation's highest per capita rates of motor vehicle ownership, with one vehicle for almost every adult resident. After being introduced to Colorado in 1899, automobiles caught on quickly. By the 1920s many small towns boasted auto showrooms and gas stations, which often aspired to be stylish. By the 1950s automobiles had become common and auto architecture more prosaic.
Cities and towns were asphalted, and monumental public buildings, businesses, and residences erected by the pioneers were demolished for auto parking, sales lots, and service stations. Despite the sacrifices downtown to accommodate cars, motorists often preferred suburban shopping centers. Since shopping center sales taxes are a major means of financing local governments, localities vigorously promoted construction of new malls, leading to further decay not only in the city core but also in older suburban shopping centers. Following California precedents, Coloradans built and patronized auto-oriented businesses along highway strips, where drive-in banks, restaurants, and theaters proliferated with attendant gasoline alleys of service stations, car dealers, and auto parts stores. As in other places, heavy auto traffic reshaped housing: families abandoned front porches for the quiet and privacy of backyard patios. Garages, once detached like carriage houses, became appendages to houses, and two- and three-car units have became standard in new middle- and upper-class subdivisions. Garages became the front doors to homes, apartment buildings, and office towers.
Acrobatic freeways snaked over, under, and through nineteenth-century urban cores. On the fringes of towns and cities, new suburbs sprouted for miles along freeways. Interstate highways rearranged the landscape with cuts and high fills to keep traffic as straight, level, and fast as possible. Twin freeway tracks, tunnels, overpasses, and the proliferation of roadside development have made highways the most environmentally significant transportation corridors.
In fifty years Colorado's population jumped from 1.1 million (1940) to 1.75 million (1960) to almost 3.3 million (1990). More than 4 million are projected for 2000. Both population and new construction have followed the freeway, just as they once followed rail and streetcar lines. If an interstate came thorough a community, the town usually rearranged itself accordingly. Bypassed communities stagnated, withered, or died. While outlying farming and mining towns bypassed by freeways declined, three-fourths of the state's population settled along the I-25 corridor between Pueblo and Fort Collins.
The detrimental impact of the automobile has led to recent efforts at autofree environments. Autos have been banned from downtown pedestrian malls, some ski resorts, and some historic districts. Increasingly, planners and architects seek auto-free zones friendly to pedestrians and bicyclists. Often-times, car parks are now bermed or buried underground. In the 1990s, new subdivisions in Larimer and Arapahoe counties experimented with designs that severely curb auto intrusions into community life.
While railroads gave birth to many Colorado communities and automobiles reshaped them, aviation has become the latest major urban catalyst. As early as the 1920s airports began appearing in mountain meadows, western plateaus, and eastern wheat fields. Ever since, even the silence of remote wilderness areas has been shattered by the droning of propeller planes and the roar of jets. New airports have transformed Aspen, Denver, Telluride, and Grand Junction, attracting hotels, restaurants, and other businesses that once revolved around train stations.
Denver International Airport (DIA) epitomizes air age development. Coloradans call it the “world's largest airport,” both for its 54-square-mile site and its potential for growth. In fact it is outranked in size by the King Kahlid International Airport outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which covers 86 square miles, and by Mirabel International Airport outside Montreal, Canada, which occupies 70 square miles. Nonetheless, DIA is Colorado's biggest building, in terms not only of space but of cost—more than $3 billion. It is also remarkable for its architecture. The terminal roof, made of Teflon-coated fiberglass, consists of transparent, tentlike structures that are translucent by day and glow at night. The cluster of tents is reminiscent of the Arapaho and Cheyenne tipis which once occupied the site.
Tourism
Rail, auto, and air networks have all fostered tourism, Colorado's second largest industry. Much architecture has been designed to attract sightseers, beginning with eastern dudes who came looking for the Wild West. Coloradans indulged tourists with rustic log structures adorned with stone fireplaces and Stick Style trim and furniture. Many fading mining towns and ranches survived by courting tourists, by capitalizing on early twentieth-century America's romance with the great outdoors. During the 1950s tourist architecture began to borrow design elements from Western movie sets. Three towns—Buckskin Joe in Fremont County, Orchard in Weld County, and Ridgway in Ouray County—retain synthetic Hollywood props that have been confused with historic nineteenth-century structures. In Colorado Springs, sightseers swarm to a fake cowboy ghost town and fake Manitou Indian cliff dwellings. Since gambling became legal in Black Hawk, Central City, and Cripple Creek in 1991, alterations of historic buildings have strained design guidelines in these National Historic Landmark towns. Only the facades remain on what are usually mostly new structures. Florid interiors with flocked wallpaper have been crammed with as many slot machines as possible. The Wild West has made a last stand in the imitation Victoriana of these gambling towns.
Colorado's ski resorts have developed an alternative to the false-fronted, Gilded Age, Wild West style: Alpine architecture. By 1900 Switzerland, the world's nineteenth-century pacesetter in tourist promotion, became a model for Colorado. Estes Park and Ouray began puffing themselves as the “Switzerland of America.” Shops, hotels, cafes, summer homes, and public structures began wearing the Alpine Style, with its steep-pitched roofs over white stucco and half-timbered walls with window flower boxes. The style bloomed most fully in the 1960s at Vail, the first fully planned tourist town. Since then Vail and other mountain resort towns have moved beyond ersatz Swiss styles to intriguing Modernist and Post-modern architecture.
Growing refinement in designing and redesigning tourist towns has led to improved landscaping, more sensitive treatment of waterways, reduction of auto-related activity, and promotion of public sculpture and pedestrian ambiance. To please locals and tourists alike, Aspen, Boulder, Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Denver, Estes Park, Telluride, and Vail have also experimented with contemporary pedestrian-oriented design that helps to raise statewide design consciousness.
In contrast to master-planned and architect-designed environments are mobile home parks, a growing phenomenon in Colorado, where the gap between the rich and the poor is expanding faster, according to the 1990 census, than in any state except Louisiana, Virginia, and West Virginia. The creation of a huge service class, especially notable around Colorado's affluent suburban communities and mountain resorts, has had an impact on the architecture. Many residents are renters who can hope to buy only inexpensive mobile homes, and roughly one Colorado family in ten resides in this type of housing. Mobile homes are an affordable, innovative, and flexible solution, as Alan D. Wallis pointed out in Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes (1991). Yet planners and most architectural historians have ignored them, viewing them with distaste, if not contempt.
The Architects
A few nationally prominent architects have practiced extensively in Colorado, although only Frank E. and Willoughby J. Edbrooke and Herbert Bayer rate separate entries in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects (1982). Following the example of Horace Tabor, other capitalists commissioned out-of-state architects instead of local builders. The flush times of the 1870s and 1880s attracted many Illinois architects, including Robert Roeschlaub, Montezuma Fuller, William Lang, Charles and Edward Quayle, and Isaac H. Rapp. The Illinois impact may be seen in Denver skyscrapers, which tended toward the flat-topped Chicago School version rather than the stepbacks and spires of New York City's towers.
The attempt to professionalize Colorado building design and raise architectural consciousness was spearheaded by Jesse B. Dorman's Western Architect and Building News. This illustrated monthly extolled architecture as the most democratic and important art form. Dorman's magazine, as architectural historian Richard Brettell put it, was “a rudder guiding the course of the building boom.” Although this Denver journal lasted only from 1889 to 1891, it successfully promoted the Colorado Association of Architects, which in 1892 became the Colorado chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In 1909 the AIA persuaded the Colorado legislature to begin licensing architects.
The Colorado AIA initially welcomed members from Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah, before these states founded their own associations. A separate Denver chapter was formed in 1960, followed by local AIA chapters for southern, northern, and western Colorado. A short-lived school of architecture at the University of Denver during the late 1940s and the early 1950s was followed in 1962 by one at the University of Colorado, whose College of Architecture and Planning is now on its Denver campus.
By the 1920s Colorado could claim an impressive array of architects. Yet major patrons often have bypassed local talent for national stars. These celebrities sometimes stuck Colorado with such “look-at-me” erections as Philip Johnson's Norwest Bank tower, which defies Denver's Mountain View Ordinance and also disfigures I. M. Pei's Mile High Center, which it wraps. Johnson's fifty-two-story tower is topped by a curved peak which sheds accumulated ice and snow on pedestrians. When told of this, Johnson replied, according to local folklore, “I thought we designed that building for Houston!” Michael Graves's Denver Public Library (1995) is a Post-modern composition using multi-colored cast stone with Graves's signature shapes: rectangles, cubes, pyramids, and a drum. The Graves design, done in partnership with the Denver firm of Klipp Colussy Jenks DuBois, reluctantly incorporated Burnham Hoyt's 1955 landmarked library into its village of use-oriented spaces.
After first struggling to establish their profession, Colorado architects began developing, more or less consciously, a regional style. The brothers William E. and Arthur A. Fisher, who dominated both residential and commercial building in Denver between 1910 and 1930, favored the red tile roofs and thick masonry walls of Mediterranean design. This type of construction provided the durable weatherproofing required by Colorado's erratic climate. In a state blessed with 300 days of sunshine a year, one consideration of a new regional architecture has been solar energy. The National Solar Energy Research Institute, opened during the 1970s in Golden with bright hopes, but subsequent federal cutbacks in funding and elimination of the solar design tax credit eclipsed the industry.
Despite efforts to develop a regional architecture, modern Colorado communities differ little from others in the United States. Some regional variation is seen in the predilection for masonry materials. Also somewhat distinctive are the Hispanic towns of southern Colorado and the ski resort towns, where extravagant vacation homes and recreational amenities feature custom designs by many of America's leading architects. In the ongoing search for a Colorado, or at least a Rocky Mountain, style, one of the most successful modes so far has been Southwestern (Mediterranean, Mission, Pueblo, and Spanish Colonial revivals), which suits the region's climatic extremes. Isaac H. Rapp of Trinidad helped to create the Santa Fe Style, refined by the better-known Santa Fe architect John Gaw Meem. Notable Colorado architects such as Thomas MacLaren in Colorado Springs; the contemporary firm of Hurtig, Gardner and Froelich in Pueblo; and William and Arthur Fisher, Jacques Benedict, and Burnham Hoyt in Denver have produced notable interpretations of Southwestern styles over the years. Burnham Hoyt's outdoor amphitheater at Red Rocks, Colorado's finest piece of Modernist architecture, integrates minimalist construction with the natural environment. Unfortunately, few other architects have so sensitively accommodated natural terrain and vegetation in their work.
Architect John Gaw Meem spearheaded the Spanish Colonial Revival and fostered an appreciation of traditional Spanish colonial art. He designed the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center to house the Alice Bemis Taylor Collection.
Developing an indigenous style, in the view of some, is not as important as introducing contemporary architecture to Coloradans, who usually have chosen traditional, conservative buildings. twentieth-century styles—Prairie, Art Deco, International, Streamline Moderne, and Post-modern—have caught on slowly. As early as the 1930s, Modernist concepts, shapes, and materials were introduced by such architects as Robert K. Fuller, Eugene G. Groves, Thompson D. Hetherington, Burnham Hoyt, Glen H. Huntington, and G. Charles Jaka. Yet before the 1950s few architects could make a living by specializing solely in Modernist design. Temple Hoyne Buell, the state's most successful developer-architect, told this author in 1986 with a wink: “We don't fight over architectural styles. The client is always right.”
Victor Hornbein, an uncompromising Modernist, responded to Colorado's intense sunshine with roof overhangs that become sheltering eaves and with clerestory windows on flat-roofed, low-slung buildings that hunker down on the prairie to squint at the mountains. Hornbein contended that “creative regional architecture arises out of the use to which the building will be put,… the environmental determinants, and hopes that society can sustain itself without the accoutrements of long dead civilizations.” Eugene Sternberg, another champion of modernism, argues that “Coloradans should be building into the future, not the past. No gimmickry. No gingerbread. And no false-fronted Post-modernism. Why spend so many resources restoring buildings for tourists instead of allowing a new generation of architects to build for the people who live here?”
Some Modernists have carved special niches: Richard L. Crowther's solar architecture, Thomas E. Moore's innovative precast concrete structural systems, Charles Haertling's organic, sculptural buildings in Boulder, Frederick A. (Fritz) Benedict's distinctive Taliesin designs in Aspen, William C. Muchow's Miesian monuments, Kenneth R. Fuller's service to the profession and to local architectural history and education. Charles S. Sink, who worked for I. M. Pei on several Denver projects, is noted for his command of Modernist architectural concepts, structural systems, and clarity in spatial relationships. G. Cabell Childress has adapted historical and modern styles to fit the peculiar Colorado weather and landscapes. Akira Kanawabe designed low-budget solar structures in the San Luis Valley. Herbert Bayer, the Austrian immigrant and champion of Bauhaus design, helped transform Aspen into a festival of Modernist architecture.
Mrs. L. C. Tuthill, the author of an early survey of U.S. architecture entitled History of Architecture (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1848), dedicated her work “to the ladies of the U.S. of A., the acknowledged arbiters of taste.” Women, who often inspired and insisted on fine architecture, have entered the profession. Colorado Women in Architecture counts more than 100 women among some 1,500 licensed architects in Colorado.
Anne Evans was a philanthropist rather than an architect, but her impact has been tremendous. A graduate of the Chicago Art Institute, she spearheaded Colorado's first major preservation effort, the 1932 renovation of the Central City Opera House, a successful summer opera prototype. Perhaps to atone for the sins of her father, a Colorado territorial governor removed from office after the massacre of Arapaho and Cheyenne at Sand Creek, Anne Evans did more than any other Coloradan to make Native American and Hispanic art and architecture respectable. She was one of the first people in the country to perceive Indian crafts and artifacts as art. The Native American art she donated to the Denver Art Museum made possible the first department of Native American art in any art museum. Native Arts is still among the DAM's strongest collections. Alice Bemis Taylor played a similar role in Colorado Springs, where she commissioned John Gaw Meem to design the Fine Arts Center, which she endowed with an outstanding collection of indigenous art and architectural relics.
Historic Preservation
Fast and reckless architecture has more often compromised than complemented Colorado's breathtaking landscape. Although a transient population and the ephemeral nature of much construction may be a national disorder, rootlessness seemed particularly detrimental to good design in the Rocky Mountain West. In the first Western novel, The Virginian (1905), a Harvard-educated tenderfoot, Owen Wister, compared pioneer Rocky Mountain towns to decks of cards:
Scattered wide they littered the frontier. They lay stark, dotted over a planet of treeless dust, like soiled packs of cards.… Houses, empty bottles, and garbage, they were forever the same shapeless pattern.… They seem to have been strewn there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should come again and blow them away.
Wister's description still fits many Rocky Mountain towns. The majority of them have blown away with the wind. In Colorado alone, more than 300 post office towns have disappeared from the map, leaving the state with more ghost towns than live ones. Disposable towns as well as disposable buildings have left Colorado with a fragmented architectural heritage.
Colorado's post–World War II energy boom, an echo of the 1870–1893 mining bonanza years, along with the impact of the automobile, led to the alteration or demolition of much of the nineteenth-century built environment. Postwar prosperity, however, bypassed most of the eastern plains and southern Colorado, two generally static or declining agricultural regions. In surviving rural communities, the finest buildings are often stout masonry business blocks, churches, residential four-squares, and bungalows constructed during the flush times between 1900 and 1920. Poverty has been preservation's greatest ally in rural areas, where structures are rarely demolished. Adobe or hewn log residences, when replaced by bigger and newer houses, are typically kept as outbuildings. Even old henhouses, root cellars, and barns are kept by frugal farmers.
Colorado's postwar boom ended with the mid-1980s collapse of oil prices. For the first time since the 1890s, Colorado actually lost population. As in the 1890s, prairie dogs began to repossess subdivisions platted by ambitious developers caught in a recession. Recovery came in the 1990s, but construction levels of the 1970s will probably not be reached until the twenty-first century.
Demolition of Colorado's nineteenth-century architectural heritage sparked a grassroots preservation movement. Starting quietly in the 1960s, architect Edward D. White, Jr., pioneered preservation projects: the Lace House in Black Hawk, the Governor's Mansion and Four Mile House in Denver, and master plans for preserving Central City and Denver's Ninth Street Park, on the Auraria Higher Education Center campus. Passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 created a federally funded State Historic Preservation Office in each state to identify, designate, and preserve buildings of architectural and historical significance. As a national reaction to urban renewal demolitions and to the American tradition of disposable architecture, the preservation movement found strong support in Colorado. Preservationists drew courage from the environmental movement, which achieved a major success by persuading two out of three Colorado voters to reject state funding for the 1976 Winter Olympics, thus killing that proposal. The 1976 National Bicentennial/Colorado Statehood Centennial celebrations inspired many communities to consider their architectural heritages and undertake preservation efforts.
Reinforcing federal tax laws encouraging historic preservation, the state of Colorado enacted in 1991 a program of state income tax credits for rehabilitation of designated national or local landmarks. Colorado has some fifteen National Historic Landmark sites, more than 161 National Register Historic Districts, and more than 800 individual sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A major remaining challenge is to preserve newer buildings of outstanding architectural merit that do not meet current National Register guidelines for age and association with august personalities. The State Historical Fund uses tax revenues generated from gaming. As of 1997, some $40 million in gambling taxes had funded more than 1,000 preservation projects.
The renewed interest in historic structures has shaped even new buildings, which since the 1980s have often incorporated or echoed traditional shapes, materials, and elements. Neo–revival style subdivisions have replaced ranch houses as the suburban norm. In cities traditionally inspired ornament is reappearing as a reaction to stark, flat-topped parallelepipeds. Even the Greek column and pediment and the Roman arch and dome are making comebacks.
Some forty cities and towns—notably Aspen, Aurora, Boulder, Breckenridge, Central City, Crested Butte, Cripple Creek, Denver, Durango, Fort Collins, Georgetown, Golden, Longmont, Manitou Springs, Ouray, and Telluride—have passed local preservation ordinances, often with controls over the demolition or abuse of landmarks. Thanks to such preservation efforts, Colorado's monuments to various cultures and architectural traditions now have prospects for longer and more productive lives.
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