Ieoh Ming Pei began his first large-scale commission as an independent architect in the foothills of the Rockies in 1961. The project assignment, under the direction of Walter Orr Roberts, the founding director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, was to provide over 240,000 square feet of research laboratories on a wild, windswept site shadowed by the tilted, sandstone cliffs of the Flatirons.
Pei and his wife Eileen drove around Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona to get a feel for the high desert country. After visiting the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, recently designed by Walter Netsch as chief architect for SOM, Pei decided that the "detached object in landscape" approach had no chance against the scale of the cliffs and mountains over his 565 acre site...
Instead, he took inspiration from the Anasazi cliff dwellings conceived by the region's earliest inhabitants. After an early proposal for a single tower was rejected by NCAR director Roberts, Pei proposed a scheme with multiple, faceted towers with rectilinear masses and projections to provide sharp delineation of form in bright sunlight, as well as to provide shade and human scale.
Courtyards linked the towers to each other and to the landscape, providing places for scientists to meet informally when in transit between labs. Pei avoided long, narrow corridors full of doors, instead widening the internal routes where windows opened to the landscape. Crushed aggregate from local sandstone was employed in the concrete mix to create an impression the buildings were carved out of the cliffs; this impression was enhanced by mechanically 'bush-hammering" the concrete surfaces to provide vertical striations. Beyond the Native American influence, the towers at NCAR showed Pei's awareness of Louis Kahn's design for the Richards Medical Center in Philadelphia (1957-61). At NCAR, however, the spaces shaped by the architect were judged by the users to better fit their purpose than at Richards...
From the beginning, the work of those scIentists involved recording weather patterns over time to identify climate change, measuring wind patterns so that useful data on wind shear could be provided to airports, and looking at the composition of the atmosphere itself, an important task in the Front Range of the Rockies, where the infamous "brown cloud" of automotive and industrial emissions were a part of daily life by the time the NCAR buildings were completed in 1967.
Also from the beginning, NCAR provided public space with educational exhibits showing the formation of phenomena like clouds and tornadoes. Over the decades, its atmospheric research involving high altitude balloons and satellites provided essential evidence of a phenomenon that was universally recognized by the world's scientists at the time of my first NCAR tour 25 years ago: man-made climate change, otherwise known as global warming.
The mountains are easily reached by hiking trails which link the complex to the foothills. Rattlesnake warnings are posted in the hot season, but you are just as likely to see deer, coyote, and the occasional black bear.
While the mission of of NCAR has moved the organization into the spotlight and onto the front lines of the fight to mitigate climate change, their headquarters and sole laboratory complex has maintained its quiet presence in the landscape, with no external changes beyond the provision of a small, low-lying building for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research across the access road, underground additions to the main building for supercomputer studies, and one above-ground annex in 1980.
Naturalists and architectural preservationists want to keep it that way. Pei's NCAR complex was granted the American Institute of Architects Colorado Chapter's 25 Year Award in 1997. It's for buildings that are still serving their original function 25 to 45 years after they were completed...
I.M. Pei died on May 16, 2019 at the age of 102. There may exist, somewhere, a building complex more attuned to its natural surroundings than his work at NCAR, but that would be, in the words of James Taylor, in "another land, beneath another sky"...
*Footnote: The final line is from the song and album entitled "Never Die Young", copyright 1988 by James Taylor.
Photo Credit: All photos are by the author.
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