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Presenting Nature
MENU
Design Ethic Origins
(1916-1927)
Design Policy & Process
(1916-1927)
Western Field Office
(1927-1932)
Decade of Expansion
(1933-1942)
State Parks
(1933-1942)
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Presenting Nature:
The Historic Landscape Design of the National Park Service, 1916-1942 |
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II. ORIGINS OF A DESIGN ETHIC FOR NATURAL PARKS (continued)
SOURCES OF RUSTIC ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN (continued)
THE GREAT CAMPS OF THE ADIRONDACKS
The great camps of New York's Adirondack region provided one of the earliest and strongest expressions of Downing's ideas for a picturesque rustic style appropriate for a natural area or wilderness. The camps were frequently lakeside resorts consisting of several buildings separated by function. The camps were sited to fit the natural contours of the land, to take advantage of the scenic views of the surrounding lakes, mountains, and woodlands, and to offer outdoor activities such as fishing and boating. As it evolved in the late nineteenth century. the Adirondack style adopted features of the Shingle style, the local vernacular of pioneer log cabins, and the romantic European styles of country homes, especially the chalet form of the Swiss Alps and the German farmhouse with jerkinhead gables. These European styles had been popularized in America by Downing in his Architecture of Country Houses of 1850 and by Calvert Vaux in Villas and Cottages of 1857. The resulting fusion of pattern-book sources and pioneer traditions was compatible with Downing's principles for picturesque and rustic forms that used natural materials in naturalistic forms.
The Adirondack camps, with their cabins, boat houses, and lodges, drew heavily on Downing's suggestions for rustic and picturesque constructions of twisted unpeeled trunks and branches. Their architectural forms and functional designs, however, were derived from the pioneer building traditions of a region with a severe climate and an abundant local supply of logs and boulders. The Adirondack region had heavy snowfalls in winter and extended periods of rain in the spring and summer. Log structures were therefore set upon foundations of stone built up around the first story and battered to shed rain and snow. Oversized timbers were used to support roofs that could hold heavy loads of snow. Overhanging roofs prevented ice and snow from building up against the walls and foundations. Logs were tightly joined and chinked to keep out driving rain and cold wind. Builders raised all log and timber elements off the ground onto stones to reduce interior dampness and prevent the rotting of timbers by rising dampness. The notching of logs at the corners of buildings strengthened the walls, and roof trusses and beams were exposed. The most successful designs, according to the historian Harvey Kaiser, were those where the building materials repeated the qualities of the surrounding forest, such as natural color, the scale of local timber, and even the natural grain of wood used for decorative effects. [134]
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| The Dining Hall at camp Uncas, the Adirondack camp built for financier J. P. Morgan between 1893 and 1895, illustrates characteristics typical of the Adirondack style. The hall was carefully sited above Mohegan Lake to afford views, to disturb as few trees as possible, and to blend with the natural setting. It features a stone rubble foundation, spruce log walls, and a gable roof with overhangs and exposed purlins. A massive native stone chimney projects through the roof. (New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation) |
Fear of fire led builders to construct tall chimneys that rose high above the roof ridge. Capping around the tops trapped sparks. Fireplaces were built of cyclopean rocks and capped by massive stone slabs for mantles. Fireplaces needed to be sturdy and safe and draw well. This type of fireplace, a signature of the Adirondack lodge, would be incorporated in the lodges of park concessionaires, from the Bear Mountain and Shenandoah lodges of the East to the Old Faithful and Glacier hotels of the West. [135]
Another feature of the Adirondack camps was the placement of separate functions in individual buildings informally arranged within the natural topography. The construction of many small buildings often attached by covered walkways was motivated by concern for fire. The idea of the sylvan village derived first from the building of tent platforms in the woods and was later carried over into permanent buildings. Sleeping accommodations were housed in small cabins or on the second stories of the lakeside boat houses. Eating and social gatherings often took place in separate buildings. Later they were located in the lodge, constructed as a central gathering place. Buildings were connected by covered boardwalks and enclosed passageways. This arrangement enabled the camps to increase in size through the years and become small villages. Staff housing and utilities were commonly built in separate "service complexes" located away from the central camp. Published in 1889, Log Cabins: How to Build and Furnish Them by William S. Wicks was likely the first published guide to siting, constructing, and furnishing log cabins for recreational purposes in keeping with the Adirondack tradition. Wicks told his readers to select sites based on scenic views, accessibility. frontage on the water, and protection by trees. He was one of the first to promote the idea that structures should be an outgrowth of the site and harmonize with it. [136]
The Adirondack style expanded Downing's methods of construction for rural architecture into a major form of picturesque architectural ornamentation. Previously confined to park and garden use in gazebos, fences, outdoor furniture, gateways, and bridges, Downing's twisted branches and tree trunks found their way into elaborate rustic embellishments from peeled-bark sheathing for walls to elaborate porch railings and gable vergeboards made of sinuous branches and roots. Branches from the surrounding woodland and roots exposed along the lakeshore were gathered, entwined, and tied to create a wide variety of imaginative forms, such as the name of the camp or a decorative porch railing. These forms became an insignia of the Adirondack style and were copied elsewhere in rustic resorts and recreational architecture and appeared in signs, gateways, bridges, and cabins from the White Mountains to Camp Curry in Yosemite by the turn of the century. A whole style of decorative arts grew up around this type of rustic ornamentation and extended to handcrafted furniture and interior design as well as exterior features. As a major manifestation of the Arts and Crafts movement in America, variations appeared in the West that incorporated discarded antlers of elk and the leather and hides of domestic and wild animals. A number of the early hotels in national parks, such as those of Glacier National Park and Yellowstone National Park's Old Faithful Inn, were influenced by the architecture as well as the decorative arts characteristic of the Adirondack style. In fact, antlers were fashioned into a movable gate for the Entrance Arch for Yellowstone National Park in Gardiner, Montana, and they dressed the stone foundation of the park's Cook entrance station in the mid-1930s, a variation of the "naturalistic garden."
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| The concern for harmonizing with nature extended to the design of the many small structures associated with the Adirondack camps. The pump house at camp Uncas was constructed of exterior pole framing made of native cedar logs and sheathing of spruce bark. A cobblestone chimney projects through the shingled gable roof. (New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation) |
By 1917, however, such embellishment was seen as an impractical and undesirable affectation and rejected in favor of more sturdy, functional, and unadorned structures. The movement away from ornamented designs reflected the emergence of the "form follows function" principle of the twentieth century. urged by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Henry Hubbard suggested more simple lattice patterns constructed of small vertical, horizontal, and diagonal logs, while Frank Waugh decried the "twig-like" ornamentation. National Park Service spokesman Herbert Maier classified such ornamentation as "gingerbread" and, in 1935, cautioned state park designers against its use for park structures.
Although influenced by pioneer traditions, the Adirondack style adopted characteristics of European design, especially that of Switzerland and Scandinavia, which Downing had strongly recommended as appropriate for American homes in a rural setting. The influence of Swiss architecture dominated in the Adirondack camps, mainly because it was widely used by entrepreneur William West Durant in his four camps—Pine Knot, Uncas, Sagamore, and Kill Kare. Swiss-influenced characteristics included the chalet form of a compact two-story building with a gabled front, broad overhanging roofs, a projecting second-story balcony extending across the gable with railings of roughly sawn boards with simple cut-out designs, and horizontal ribbons of small-paned windows. The Swiss style adopted by Durant suited the practical conditions and needs of the Adirondacks and capitalized on the romantic appeal of a remote northern retreat. So popular was the Swiss imagery that William S. B. Dana published The Swiss Chalet Book in 1913. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the designers of national park lodges at Glacier, Bryce, Zion, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone national parks continued to be influenced by the romantic mountain imagery of Swiss architecture. Swiss-inspired details remained a part of the park designer's vocabulary long after the recognizable chalet form itself was abandoned. [137]
Influences on the Adirondack style came from other parts of the world as well. The arrangement of the camps in a "compound-plan tradition" was derived from the forest camps of Japan, Europe, and Russia. At Durant's Camp Pine Knot, buildings were scattered informally across the land, each being situated for views while maintaining proximity to one another. This type of arrangement would be imitated in many of the cabin clusters built during the 1930s in state and national parks and would become a model for the arrangement of the organization camps in recreational demonstration areas. This arrangement afforded privacy and fire protection and allowed the siting of individual buildings for view and accommodation to the terrain without destroying the sense of community and settlement. [138]
The jerkinhead gable, used extensively at Sekon Lodge in the Adirondacks, had its origins in the country architecture of southern Germany. The use of the jerkinhead gable suggests shelter, brings buildings closer to the ground, and adds the same domestic scale to all buildings. It was sometimes supported on a cross brace formed by an unpeeled log. The jerkinhead gable was frequently used by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who designed park lodges for the Utah Parks Company in the mid-1920s, and was promoted by Herbert Maier for use in state park structures. [139]
The William A. Read Camp (1906) by the architectural firm of Davis, McGrath, and Shepard was one of the few camps designed by an architect. The lodge with living room and bedrooms was sited on a knoll projecting into the lake, while the dining room, kitchen, and servants' quarters were situated two hundred feet away on a rocky point. The two were connected by a covered passage of ramps and stairs that provided scenic views and allowed for changes in grade. A square viewing pavilion was built midway between the lodge and dining room.
A 1907 article in House and Garden described the picturesque effect created at the lakeside retreat and the efforts that builder and owner had taken to harmonize the construction with the natural setting. The article pointed out that no attempt had been made at landscape gardening but that the grounds had been left in a natural state and natural grades had been preserved. Logs, carefully selected for size, had been cut from the surrounding forest. Only a single tree was taken from any one place, so that its loss would not be noticed from the lake. Stone for foundations, fireplaces, and chimneys was quarried from nearby but out-of-sight mountainsides. The railings along the covered walkway and porches were made of peeled logs arranged in a rhythmic pattern of diagonal crosses alternating with parallel uprights. Drawings of the elevations of the Read Camp were published in 1906 in the American Architect and Building News showing the carefully cut and laid logs stepped out to meet the foundation and support the broad overhanging roof and upper-story balconies. The two-story lodge was built into the naturally rising grade on a foundation of stone. A porch was built along three sides and a covered passageway supported on rustic columns connected the wings of the north elevation facing away from the lake. Chimneys pierced the overhanging roofs. The elevation rising from the stone foundation showed an alternating design of dark-stained logs and white plaster chinking made of portland cement over lath. [140]
The Read Camp established an aesthetic for rustic construction that surpassed both pioneer log cabins and the earlier fussy yet primitive camps. The ingenious integration of a hillside site and the rich display of rusticated details provided a perfect prototype for natural park design. Projecting gable ends, broad overhangs, corbeled logs, stepped corner logs at the foundations and roof supports, scrolled brackets, and porch and balcony railings made of vertical planks added a Swiss feeling to the building's decor. Although features such as the second-story balcony and gable ends drew from the Swiss chalet prototype, the sophisticated log construction and detailing, the overall massing, and the penetration of the massive stone chimneys through the overhanging roof were of American derivation. Solid hewn beams with chamfered edges were supported on corbeled brackets. Great importance was attached to the small paned windows, which resembled those of frontier cabins and added to the quaintness of the building. The dining room was a large octagonal room with an exposed roofing system of heavy hand-hewn trusses and a huge stone fireplace measuring six and a half feet wide by five feet high.
These characteristics would find their way to national parks through popular appeal and contemporary journals and magazines, including American Architect and Building News, House and Garden, and The Craftsman. Designs and ideas were also published in many popular bungalow pattern books such as William Comstock's Bungalows, Camps and Mountain Houses, that appeared in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
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| The guest cabin, whimsically called the "Bishops Palace," at camp Wild Air in the Adirondack region of New York, dates from 1908. Sited on the shore of Upper St. Regis Lake amidst towering fir trees, the cabin features a polygonal shape that affords panoramic views of the lake and surrounding wilderness. It is constructed of solid logs, and features a massive stone chimney and pavilion-like hipped roof with overhanging eaves. A walkway of immense, irregularly-shaped flagstones provides further harmony between the man-made structure and the natural setting. (New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation) |
In 1931, an illustrated manual on Adirondack architecture was published that included numerous plans, details, and photographs. Entitled Camps in the Woods and written by Augustus D. Shepard, an architect of the Read Camp and a number of other Adirondack buildings, it was a compendium of the lodges, boat houses, and camps the author had designed at the Adirondack League Club—a private reserve of one hundred thousand acres within the Adirondacks. Shepard's book reveals how the Adirondack style evolved in the twentieth century, accommodating new ideas arising from the Prairie style of architecture, the American Arts and Crafts movement, and other sources. No longer primitive rustic cabins of the 1880s, the twentieth-century camps were "summer homes in the woods." Built of the best materials, they were "permanent, liveable, comfortable" and provided every modern convenience. They could be constructed and equipped for year-round use by building a cellar with a heating plant and by installing weatherproofed water and sewage systems. [141]
Shepard considered the lakeside boat house to be the most important feature of a camp in the woods. Located at the water's edge, the boat house had docks and piers and often served as the main entrance to a camp. The ground level was designed to store boats and equipment, while the second story contained guest rooms. Shepard showed many rustic boat houses, some with porches adorned with entwined branchwork, others built of stone and log. One common feature was the balcony, generally located on the second story above the boat dock. This balcony, often large enough to be called a porch, provided a lake view and an outdoor sitting area. An enclosed living room could be reached through a door at the back of the balcony and was graced by a massive stone fireplace. One of the most interesting examples was at the Riker Camp, where massive irregularly shaped and sized blocks made up the masonry of the lower level. The upper story was fronted by an open, semioctagonal porch having log columns with branching brackets, sawn wood rails, and an overhanging roof with exposed purlins. [142]
The octagon was an architectural feature widely adopted wherever a broad or panoramic view from several angles was desirable. Popularized by Orson S. Fowler in A Home for All first published in 1848, it had been common in dwellings, schoolhouses, and lighthouses since the nineteenth century. Downing had shown shelters of octagonal form. The octagon was easy to construct and afforded the same advantages as the circular form, such as offering wide views and having no dominant elevation. Architects working in the Shingle style adopted the octagon in sections or as a whole for viewing rooms or bays that could be joined to the mass of interlocking units that made up the house. The octagon's uses and aesthetic advantages made it suitable for adaptation by designers in the Midwest, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Adirondacks, who were all interested in capturing views and integrating their structures with the natural surroundings. Its popularity continued in resort and recreational architecture and resulted in many creative forms and uses in state and national parks in the 1930s.
In Shepard's opinion, camp buildings were to be located where they best conformed to the contour of the land and provided a southern exposure so that occupants could enjoy the morning sunrise and midday sun. The direction of prevailing winds and summer storms were other important considerations. Of the particular importance of views, Shepard wrote,
It is, of course, necessary to consider the outlook or the view which the various windows in the main living rooms afford. It is always desirable that certain windows in these important rooms face the lake. The reflection of the woods and mountains in the still waters of the lake makes a picture dear to the heart of the camp owner. [143]
Protecting the native trees was of utmost importance. Shepard showed a contour plan of the camp for George W. Vanderhoef, Jr., that indicated the location of important trees. It is interesting to note that shortly after the publication of Shepard's book, national park designers began to similarly plot important trees on the topographic maps from which they made plans and drawings. Shepard urged designers to consider the height of the forest and described the designer's concerns:
One of the first considerations of the architect is to determine what trees may be removed without disturbing the scenery and what dangerous trees should be removed; and to consider the proper treatment of all trees that are to remain. This, of course, includes all flora. The solving of this phase of the camp problem alone requires years of experience and a thorough knowledge of forestry. [144]
Upholding the idea that camps should be designed in a style "inspired by the woods," Shepard stated that "the buildings must be designed so that they actually appear to grow out of the ground; they must take their place in the woods as a part of the woods. It should be hardly discernable to the eye where the building commences." This could be accomplished by using stone posts and walls, stone and earth terraces, and hand-hewn wood steps, as nineteenth-century and Arts and Crafts-era landscape architects had recommended. Unlike his nineteenth-century predecessors, however, who fit their buildings somewhat awkwardly onto the existing terrain, Shepard fit his lodges more closely into their natural sites and settings. The cutting of natural slopes and back filling made it possible to fit a building tightly into its natural site and to eliminate unsightly voids under porches or boardwalks. Terraces, walls, and curving stairways further integrated the buildings and sites and created viewpoints where scenery could be enjoyed. Shepard's lodges were improved by flagstone walks and stepping stones, foundation plantings of ferns, and native stone walls. Many of these features followed the advances made by Prairie style and West Coast architects in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Similar techniques were being used in the design of park buildings in the late 1920s. [145]
Like Downing and practitioners in the Arts and Crafts movement, Shepard saw planting vegetation as a way to further erase the lines between natural setting and manmade construction. He recommended, "By planting Virginia Creeper at the base of the stonework and placing luxurious ferns and other wild flora at appropriate locations, the relation between the building and its setting is made even more intimate." [146]
National park designers drew heavily on the Adirondack tradition, adopting the following characteristics: the use of native logs and rock in a rustic unfinished form, naturalistic siting of structures, incorporation of porches and viewing platforms, the climatic adaptation of using native stone for the foundation and lower story and native timber above, stone chimneys with massive fireplaces and mantles, open interiors with ceilings of exposed rafters and trusses, and a multitude of windows. These characteristics perfectly suited the need to attract visitors to the parks and to harmonize amenities with natural setting. The characteristics of the Adirondack style first found their way into the national parks through the hotels, lodges, and camps of public operators and concessionaires. Glacier, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite national parks all boasted accommodations in the finest rustic style by 1920. Published sources and examples from the Adirondacks and those inspired by the Adirondack style continued to be valuable sources for national and state park designers through the 1930s.
There is no question that Shepard's book was known to the designers of national and state parks. Chief Landscape Architect Thomas Vint recommended it as a useful reference to at least one person writing him about the design of park structures. Shepard's book provided a source of designs and ideas, even though his theory was more indicative of how the building practices of the day were already being applied to the problem of rustic design in a natural setting. The book, however, strongly reinforced the interest of designers such as Vint and Herbert Maier in the architecture of the Adirondacks as prototypes for the architecture of natural areas. Appearing just two years before the beginning of the Civilian Conservation Corps and public works program, the book was filled with practical ideas and detailed drawings, diagrams, plans, and photographs of actual examples that were compatible with National Park Service principles. The park service chose a similar format when publishing its own pattern books, Park Structures and Facilities of 1935 and the three-volume Park and Recreation Structures of 1938. The park service books, edited by Albert Good, an architect from Akron, Ohio, echoed many of the principles presented in Shepard's book, and Herbert Maier incorporated many of Shepard's ideas in his inspector's guide for state park Emergency Conservation Work.
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Last Modified: Mon, Oct 31, 2002 10:00:00 pm PDT
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