Mary Colter’s Grand Canyon buildings: Hopi House, Hermit’s Rest and two more

Mary Colter's buildings at Grand Canyon took their shapes from the landscape around them. Four of her works survive on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona: Hopi House, Hermit's Rest, Lookout Studio and the Desert View Watchtower. The National Park Service calls them the best and least altered of her few remaining works. She was chief architect and decorator for the Fred Harvey Company from 1902 to 1948.

Mary Colter at age 50 (NPS archive).

An architect who took cues from the land

The NPS says Colter's free-form buildings drew directly on the landscape and helped form the artistic approach that came to be seen as appropriate for development in areas that became national parks. Her use of natural materials in forms that mimicked nature later served as a basis for what is now called rustic architecture, including the work of architect Herbert Maier. The buildings also belong to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway and Fred Harvey Company development of the South Rim, their most important destination resort. The Desert View Watchtower is also significant for tower paintings of American Indian designs copied from prehistoric pictographs and petroglyphs.

Colter was born in Pittsburgh in 1869 and grew up in Texas, Colorado and St. Paul, Minnesota. At the California School of Design in San Francisco she apprenticed in an architect's office, then taught in St. Paul. Informal contacts with the Fred Harvey Company led to a job as interior designer of the Indian Building beside the Santa Fe's new Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque; both are now destroyed, and they were the first Mission Revival buildings in New Mexico. The NPS describes her as a perfectionist who spent her life defending her vision in a largely male-dominated field. She retired in 1948 at 79, after more than 46 years with the company, and died on January 8, 1958, at 88.

Mary Colter at age 23 making a metal bowl, circa 1892 (NPS archive).

The four buildings

Hopi House, across from the El Tovar Hotel, was designed to hold the main salesrooms of Fred Harvey Indian Arts. At first it was also a dwelling: some Hopi people who worked there lived upstairs. The stepped roofs give a pueblo's impression, the reddish sandstone walls have tiny windows that admit little light, and most rooms have the traditional Hopi ceiling of saplings, grasses and twigs under a mud coating, on peeled log beams. Corner fireplaces, wall niches and mud-plaster walls are character-defining features.

Hopi artisans and family members on the roof of Hopi House, circa 1905 (Detroit Photographic; NPS archive).

Hermit's Rest was a rest stop on a short stage line from El Tovar. It sits several feet back from the rim, tucked into a man-made earthen mound that blends it into the setting. A haphazard-looking structure of stone and wood greets the visitor, who approaches through a small stone arch in a stone wall.

Hermit's Rest from the east, July 17, 1987 (NPS photo by Dan Onitsuka).

Lookout Studio was built on a precipice west of El Tovar so visitors could photograph the canyon and look through telescopes. Colter shaped its exterior to resemble the ruins of ancient Native American dwellings in the region, and its parapet rooflines and chimneys echo the irregular shapes of nearby bedrock. Its many viewing windows make it lighter inside than most of her buildings.

Lookout Studio in the snow, circa 1955 (NPS, Black).

Desert View Watchtower, one of the last of the series, stands at the eastern end of the South Rim. Its silhouette echoes the Ancestral Puebloan watchtower it was meant to mimic, and its plan joins a large circle at the north and a small one at the south by arched forms. The NPS quotes Virginia Grattan's biography as saying Colter called it a "re-creation," not a copy. It stands 70 feet high on a 30-foot base and, unlike its models, has a concrete foundation and a steel frame hidden in the stonework. The ground floor is a round observation room, the Hopi Room above holds paintings by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie on the theme of the Hopi Snake Dance, and an outdoor deck is above that.

Desert View Watchtower with its construction hoist still attached (NPS, Grant).

As a group, the buildings were designated a National Historic Landmark District on May 28, 1987.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Mary Colter and Her Buildings at Grand Canyon" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/marycolter.htm); photos credited in their captions; the biography it cites is paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.