Designing the West
In our last installment on the Fred Harvey Company, we celebrate his master architect, Mary Jane Elizabeth Colter. Born in 1869, Colter moved around the frontier in the years after the Civil War. After her father died in 1886, she attended the California School of Design in San Francisco. After graduation, she taught mechanical drawing at the Mechanical Arts High School in Minnesota. In 1901, she began working at the Fred Harvey company as an interior decorator, becoming his full time architect in 1910.One of the few rugged female architects in the business, a chain smoking perfectionist, Colter worked in the Fred Harvey company for 30 years, completing 21 projects, and worked uncredited on countless others. Her structures were a combination of organic, indigenous structures (generally of Native American origin) and a modern, commercial sensibility. She was very in tune with the history of these buildings, both the imaginative one she invented while designing, and the land around it. She was a huge influence on the Pueblo Revival style, examples of which include the Franciscan Hotel by John Gaw Meem.
The Fred Harvey Company owned the the land in and around the Grand Canyon, and Colter designed many distinctive structures there, including, Phantom Ranch, Hermit's Rest (named after Louis Boucher, a hermit who gave tours of the Grand Canyon in the 1890s) and Bright Angel Lodge, with its "Geological fireplace" which featured the different rocks featured in the Grand Canyon in chronological order. Bright Angel Lodge became the template for National Park Structures for years to come, inspiring the "National Park Service Rustic" style, which featured site materials, and large scale design elements.
Other notable Colter structures include La Posada Hotel in Winslow, AZ, The Hotel Alvarado in Albaquerque, NM, and her masterwork, The El Navajo in Gallup, TX. The latter two of these buildings were demolished in her lifetime, though La Posada has been completely restored. She died in 1958, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. One of her last projects was the sleek and moderne restaurant and bar space at Union Station, in Los Angeles. Now the space, along with the original ticket concourse, is closed to the public, though they rent the spaces out for movie and tv shoots and private parties.
Mary Coulter never achieved the notoriety of some of her fellow turn of the century architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright or Irving Gill, but her work fired the imaginations of a new breed of travellers who were eager to travel faster than anyone ever had, to come out west and to see the rich past that this new land had to offer.
posted by kuaptic. @ 9:45 AM
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