Designing the Desert: The Landscape of the Painted Desert Community Complex

Architect Richard Neutra and a young person outside the complex's apartment wing, 1962. NPS / Beinlich.

National parks in the Southwest are known for grand landscapes, remarkable natural formations and ties to Indigenous peoples, and their vernacular buildings — ranches, ancient dwellings, trading posts, colonial sites — show how people lived and worked on the land. The modernist visitor centers built under the Park Service's Mission 66 program are a sharp contrast. Petrified Forest National Park's Painted Desert Community Complex (PDCC) is one of them.

Before the complex

President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the Petrified Forest a national monument in 1906, recognizing the world's largest repository of petrified wood. Getting there became easier when Route 66 opened in the mid-1920s, passing north of the monument on its way from Chicago to Los Angeles, with some 400 miles in Arizona.

Local resident Herbert Lore built the Stone Tree House of petrified wood just off the highway. The lodge and trading post, later the Painted Desert Inn, became a popular stop, and business grew when the monument was extended north in 1931 to take in the Painted Desert. By 1950 planners saw the need for a new headquarters in the park's north; converting the inn was considered and rejected. By the end of the decade a new idea of park planning would be built on an empty site just south of the inn.

Mission 66 and the visitor center

After World War II, a more mobile public strained a park system unready for it. Visitation rose from 3,500,000 to 30,000,000 between 1931 and 1948, while spending on park facilities and staff had stalled since the 1930s. Director Conrad Wirth answered with a 10-year program to modernize the parks before the agency's 50th anniversary in 1966: Mission 66, meant to bring facilities up to date while conserving natural resources.

Its new building type was the visitor center. A single starting point would orient visitors, manage their access, cut unpredictable traffic and prevent damage to parks — and show a modern Park Service to the 80 million visitors expected by 1966. 109 visitor centers were planned. They were to be modern in substance and style: where the old rustic style used natural materials and forms to blend in, Mission 66 buildings blended in through plainness, and modern ideas about form and materials let them handle larger crowds more efficiently.

The complex from the parking lot entrance, 1962. NPS / Beinlich.

The same view, 2017. NPS / J. Holgerson.

An oasis in the desert

The Park Service expected that by the 1960s half of Petrified Forest's visitors would be in a national park for the first time, so this visitor center would explain the whole National Park System, not only the park — the first "Information Center" of its kind.

Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander designed the complex in 1958 for visitors and for the park staff who would live there. Their idea was an oasis in the desert, shaped by study of the site's sun and wind. The Park Service's first plans had a visitor area, a separate administrative area and single-family houses for staff. Neutra and Alexander rejected that and looked instead to nearby Puerco Pueblo, grouping buildings around a central plaza that gave the most shelter from the wind, with plantings, paths and other landscape elements serving visitors and separating public and private areas.

The complex's zones, from its Cultural Landscape Report. NPS.

Clustered buildings gave the shelter and privacy the windswept land could not. Multi-unit housing behind high walls made private courtyards, and larger open spaces buffered the housing blocks and divided public from private. Wirth thought the arrangement out of keeping with the vastness of the desert, but the modern design won over the Park Service's traditional approach.

The central plaza

The plaza is the heart of the complex, closed on three sides by the visitor center, apartment wing and concession building. From the visitor center's door it reads as a respite from the open road, with trees, shrubs and a reflecting pool in the far corner. Past a free-standing Arizona sandstone seat wall, its east side opens into an Open Area meant for showing native plants to the public — a use realized only recently, with a short loop trail and interpretive signs. It still eases the passage from the public plaza to the residences beyond.

The central plaza and concession building in 1962, with the visitor center at left behind. NPS / Beinlich.

Its geometry, color and materials declare the Park Service's commitment to modern design. The paving is exposed-aggregate concrete tinted to the landscape's colors and cut into panels that bring its scale down to people. Two big rectangular planters of concrete and local sandstone give seating and room for trees; four round fiberglass planters soften the right angles and screen the concession building's wall of windows. The originals were replaced in 2018.

The plantings were meant to show plants descended from the area's prehistoric flora, linking the park's lush Triassic past to its dry present. Two monkey puzzle trees (Araucaria araucana) ordered from Chile died on the way. A 1962 plan scaled the idea back to a "Triassic swamp exhibit" by the pool, a petrified wood display and two ginkgo trees. By 1963 the swamp and the other Triassic references were gone, replaced by a general "oasis" of non-native ornamentals; one ginkgo and the petrified wood stayed. Outside the plaza, native plants — oneseed juniper, rabbitbrush, Mormon tea and yuccas — tied the design to its region.

A 1962 NPS drawing of the plaza, with the "Triassic Swamp Exhibit" that was never built. NPS.

The residential courtyards

At the plaza's southeast corner, a covered concrete walk leads into the housing, sheltering people from sun and seasonal rain. Cottonwoods and pinyon pines were chosen to mark the change of setting and give shade and privacy through the housing area and trailer park.

Courtyards behind the residences' privacy wall. NPS.

The three shared plazas between housing blocks were designed with lawns, drifts of native plants and shade trees, each with its own palette of species to tell them apart, softening the walks and walls around them. Inside each unit's courtyard, Neutra wanted light-colored flowering plants — white, cream and shades of yellow and orange — against the gray block walls, to bring the feeling of sun without glare into the family's living space.

A 1963 NPS planting plan for the plazas between the housing blocks; the buildings drawn here differ from what was built. NPS.

A clean break

The complex's landscape embodies the modern look and services that drove Mission 66. As a leading example of what became known as Park Service Modern, its plantings, circulation and open space served a new idea of the visitor center and headquarters, and in form, material and purpose it made a clean break with the past. In choosing Neutra and Alexander, the Park Service fully embraced modern architecture for Mission 66.

More: the complex's Cultural Landscape Inventory and Cultural Landscape Report; Mission 66 Visitor Centers: The History of a Building Type.

Sources

Based on "Designing the Desert: Landscape & the Painted Desert Community Complex," Petrified Forest National Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Richard Neutra's description of the courtyard plantings is paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.