The Jetsons in Boulder Part 4: Roger Easton's Modest Masterpiece——Lightness and Facts on the Ground

If you walk north on 16th Street, away from Boulder High School on Arapahoe, you'll pass this building on your right.  You may not notice it at first, as it sits well back from the street on a grassy plot generously shaded by trees.  Discreet black lettering on the white landscape wall identifies it as a dental office...

But when the building at number 1636 was completed in 1964, it served as office and design studio for its architect, Roger Easton.  It was an era of societal and technological change.  On July 2 of that year, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. 26 days later, NASA's Ranger 7 hit the surface of the Moon after sending home over four thousand detailed images, fulfilling one dream of Johnson's predecessor, JFK, who had advocated for a manned landing there.  It was a time of impersonal, steel and glass corporate architecture in American cities.  Several years later, Easton would design IBM's Boulder sales office building in steel, brick and glass, as a series of formal rectangles in plan and elevation.  For his own offices, though, the architect took a different approach...

There is discipline in the detailing and use of materials, but the composition of space, mass and light is informal and inviting.  You pass between the landscape wall to the south and the enclosed structure to the north and descend a series of steps that float between rocks and shrubs.   On the north edge of the property, a burbling creek, unseen in these photos, passes below glazed walls. The wall planes finished in exterior plaster are sheer and undecorated.

Instead of decoration. Roger Easton has deployed light, structure and attention to detail in a successful effort to relate the building to human scale. In the photos above and below, note the way windows wrap around inside and outside corners above the walls to separate those walls from the roof plane.  In this clerestory space between walls and roof, the open-web steel trusses supporting the concrete roof are visible.

At key passages, as shown in the views above and below, cantilevered bays float above the ground, with defining shadows below and those light-filled clerestories above. The eave was notched around that tree near the main entry in the original design. In an era when Buckminster Fuller urged architects to calculate the weight of their buildings, Easton's 1636 building rests lightly on the land, the horizontal lines and shade from deep eaves inviting you to linger in the garden...

Passing through the central courtyard to the offices at the rear of the building, you reach another stair of floating treads leading up to a landing that seems to float as well.  Based on the evidence provided by photos taken just after the building was completed, only the size of the imposing trees seems to have marked the passage of time.  The building itself has not suffered from modifications...

As you approach that landing, you notice that it is supported by a lightweight steel structure echoing that of the roof.  Repetition of details like this one lends unity to the building as a work of art.

Another detail that Easton repeated on both stairs is the steel channel serving as a handrail, with the inward-facing flange providing a convenient grip feature, and steel rods connecting the handrail to the concrete-surfaced, steel-edged treads...

Roger Easton died in March of this year at age 92.  His independent practice in Boulder spanned 35 years from 1960.  On the day I visited this building, smoke from none-too-distant fires provided a reminder that there's a cost to ignoring facts, and a short walk through Boulder's downtown provided some handy examples of ill-considered buildings shouting  for  our attention without anything like Easton's mastery of form and detail to back up their claims.  An artifact of an era when we believed science and engineering would build a happier tomorrow, 1636 Sixteenth still speaks of that confidence, a modest and quiet fact on the ground.

*Footnote:  For earlier photo essays on Mid-Century Boulder architecture, see "The Jetsons at Home in Boulder, Colorado (Part One)", posted on June 13, 2016, "The Jetsons in Boulder Part 2: Charles Haertling Masterworks", from July 2, 2016, and "The Jetsons in Boulder Part 3: Charles Haertling at Mid-Century and Beyond", from June 30, 2020.

Photo Credits:
All photos are by the author.