Mary Colter
Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter (born April 4, 1869 Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , † January 8, 1958 ) was an American architect .
As a child, Mary Colter traveled with her family through the border areas of Minnesota, Colorado, and Texas in the years following the American Civil War . After her father died in 1886, she attended the California School of Design in San Francisco . In 1901 the Fred Harvey Company (the developer of the famous Harvey houses) offered her a job to furnish the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque . Colter started her full-time job for the company in 1910 and at the same time switched from the post of interior designer to an architectural position.
For the next thirty years she worked as one of the few female architects and under harsh conditions, overseeing 21 projects for the entrepreneur Fred Harvey . She created a number of hotels and accommodations for business travelers in the southwestern United States , including La Posada and the 1922 Phantom Ranch building at the foot of the Grand Canyon , and five building complexes on the southern rim of the Grand Canyon: the Hopi House (1905) , Hermit's Rest (1914), the Lookout Studio observatory (1914), the 21 meter high Desert View Watchtower (1932) with its hidden steel structure, and the Bright Angel Lodge (1935); Colter furnished but did not design the El Tovar Hotel .
Her employer, Fred Harvey, conquered the west along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway through the strategic use of pretty girls with high collars, tourism and souvenirs. He had anthropologists on staff to track down Native American art forms and artifacts such as pottery, jewelery, and leatherwork. He had merchants on his staff to redesign these artifacts into commercially usable goods. And he had Mary Colter, who created unique architecture in strategic locations and who was mindful of authenticity. She developed floor plans that stood for good user experience and economic function and a playful sense and dramatic topic inside and outside.
As a chain-smoking perfectionist, she took care of backgrounds and attractive shapes. Colter designed Hermit's Rest . The Watchtower is a product of her travels and research, and she also took care of preparing a guide for tours. And she changed the name to Phantom Ranch (from Roosevelt Ranch ) to bring out a better mental image.
The Bright Angel became the de facto model for subsequent National Park Service and CCC buildings in the years that followed, influencing the look and feel of an entire architectural genre that some National Park Service call rustic . She set a precedent by using the on-site materials and daring, large-format design elements. Using fieldstones and rough-hewn wood on the floor of the Grand Canyon was the most practical thing you could do. The Bright Angel Lodge has a remarkable "geological fireplace" in the history of space and lodge with rocks that are up to the ceiling from the floor in the same arrangement as the geological layers on the walls of the canyon.
Colter's masterpiece may have been the 1923 El Navajo in Gallup, New Mexico . Noteworthy were their forward-looking mixes of modern and Native American architecture and the embodiment of Navajo sand paintings. Of all her work, Colter considered the hacienda-style La Posada Hotel (1929) in Winslow, Arizona, to be her masterpiece. She created the entire hotel including the garden, the furniture, the china - even the waitress's costume. The ATSF closed the hotel in 1957 and converted it into an office building in the 1960s. Fortunately, the hotel has recently been converted back to its former size.
In her later career, Colter designed the exorbitant train station cafe and modern cocktail bar at Union Station in Los Angeles, which is now padlocked and only used for occasional filming and LA Conservancy tours. Colter retired in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1948 and donated her collection of artifacts to Mesa Verde National Park .
literature
- Arnold Berke: Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest . Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, ISBN 1-56898-345-X .
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Colter, Mary |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Colter, Mary Elizabeth Jane (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American architect |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 4, 1869 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 8, 1958 |