West Beach Bath House: Brutalism in the Indiana Dunes

West Beach Bath House, with the Chicago skyline across Lake Michigan. Steven M. Rossi, NPS Photo Collection.

West Beach, one of the larger stretches of beach and dune in Indiana Dunes, protects fragile habitat and offers fine views of Lake Michigan. Its bath house — restrooms, showers, lockers, lifeguards and concessions — is also an iconic piece of Brutalist architecture.

A beach for the new park

• 1966: the national lakeshore was established; land purchases waited for Congress to fund them.
• Priority: West Beach was bought early because it was undeveloped (though parts were sand-mined in the early 1900s). By August 1968 the park owned 385 of its original 444 acres.
• Early 1970s: plans for visitor services included a bath house, an entrance and service road, and a 600-car parking lot — about $2 million in all.

The design

The 1973 architectural model — some features never made it into the building. NPS.

The firm Howard, Needles, Tammen & Bergendoff of Milwaukee designed it; a model was unveiled in 1973, showing a concrete structure raised on columns above the sand. It is recognized for its contribution to Brutalism: simple, functional form, lots of raw concrete, and repeated modular elements.

• Light: eight clerestories — high windows on the roof — bring in daylight.
• Color: sandblasted concrete stays a dull gray to blend with the dunes.
• The corridor: a zigzag main corridor with 90-degree turns blocks the lake wind and frames views of Lake Michigan or the dunes at each turn, from adjoining balconies.

An illuminated clerestory on the roof. Joseph Gruzalski, NPS Photo Collection.

Treading lightly

The building was meant to disturb its setting as little as possible. The original plans would have damaged rare wetlands called pannes beside today's bath house; thanks to Herb and Charlotte Read, Sylvia Troy and the Save the Dunes Council, the plans were rethought with local experts' input.

Tonn and Blank Construction of Michigan City, Indiana, built it in 1976 for $1.1 million: nine months on site, with the concrete units made starting six months before. The idea, said assistant superintendent Don Castleberry, was to set it "in a saddle between two dunes and not to be too obtrusive."

A sunset glow behind the bath house. Joseph Gruzalski, NPS Photo Collection.

Love it or hate it

Brutalism grew out of post-World War II reconstruction, with roots in the United Kingdom, and has always drawn criticism as grim or inhuman. The bath house had its share: in July 1976, on a helicopter tour of the Great Lakes with construction already under way, EPA head Russell Train reportedly said he'd needle his park friends about the design, which "stood out like a sore thumb" on the shore.

Opening

• May 21, 1977: at a ribbon-cutting for the whole West Beach unit, Congressman Floyd J. Fithian called the park "a place of magic" and led a moment of silence for Dorothy R. Buell, founder and first president of the Save the Dunes Council, who had died four days earlier in San Jose, California.
• July 1977: the bath house opened to visitors. That year the Prestressed Concrete Institute gave it top honors for "esthetic expression, function, and economy."
• A first: it was the park's first development for public use, and the first grand new public building on Indiana's shore since the Indiana Dunes State Park Pavilion of 1930.

Turn the last corner and the corridor opens onto Lake Michigan. Joseph Gruzalski, NPS Photo Collection.

How it's built

Architect-engineer Andrew Orton's 1988 book The Way We Build Now described the building as a telling example of design that puts the natural setting first. In summary:

• The key piece: a precast concrete capital — shaped like a column top — joins columns and beams at floor and roof level, leaves room to make the connections, and turns corners, letting the building be split into smaller units that soften its impact.
• Frame: columns cast in place on a 27-foot-5-inch square grid on pad footings; octagonal precast capitals set on them; precast prestressed beams on a two-way grid carrying hollow-core planks (10 inches deep at the floor, 8 at the roof), topped with concrete at the floor and insulation and roofing above.
• Walls: mostly brick at floor level, running past the columns on lines 45 degrees to the grid; the clerestories are built of precast wall panels with aluminum-framed glazing.
• Behavior: the beams carry all the tie forces; bolted, grouted beam-to-capital joints allow for shrinkage and temperature movement; the columns resist wind by cantilever action.
• Building it: only one crane; modest lifts; five beam types and eleven wall-panel types, mostly made by varying the same molds. The sandblasted units need almost no maintenance and match the dunes in color and texture.

West Beach from the air, with the new bath house, roads and parking. NPS.

Today

The bath house still serves beachgoers with washrooms, showers, lockers, lifeguards and concessions — kept clean by custodial staff for the thousands who come on sunny summer days. Plan a visit to West Beach.

Sources

Based on "West Beach Bath House," Indiana Dunes National Park, National Park Service, which quotes an excerpt from Andrew Orton, The Way We Build Now (1988), summarized here; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Photographs from Orton's book, two 1977 newspaper photographs and an individually credited aerial photograph are left out.