Quarry Visitor Center
The Quarry Visitor Center (Dinosaur National Monument) is of extraordinary national importance under NHL Criteria 1 and 4.1 The property falls under the NHL Theme IE (Expressing Cultural Values), Subtheme 5 (Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design). The property is less than 50 years old, but qualifies under Criteria Exception 8 because of its extraordinary national importance.
Under NHL Criterion 1, the property is associated with events that have made significant contributions to the broad national patterns of American history. Specifically the property is associated with the Park Service’s “Mission 66” program, which transformed the American national park system to meet postwar conditions. The park “visitor center”was the central planning and design element of the Mission 66 program. The visitor center was the most significant architectural expression of national park development in the postwar period and subsequently became the centerpiece of park planning of all types both nationally and abroad. Quarry Visitor Center was one of the earliest and most successful examples of the new building type. The building established new standards for visitor center design, and became a unique example of “in situ” interpretation of park resources. The Dinosuar Quarry Visitor Center was a very high profile project (in part because of the contemporary Echo Park dam controversy), and the new building was bound to be scrutinized and take on great significance as a symbol of Park Service stewardship in the postwar era. The critical and popular acclaim granted the building—despite and because of its extraordinary futuristic design—became an affirmation of the entire modern design direction of the Mission 66 program.
The Quarry Visitor Center is one of the four most significant visitor centers produced by the Mission 66 program. Because of its significance within the Mission 66 program, and therefore within the history of American parks, the property possesses extraordinary national importance under NHL Criterion 1.
The Quarry Visitor Center is located in Dinosaur National Monument in Uintah County, Utah and was added to the National Register of Historic Places on (#86003401) December 19, 1986.
Under NHL Criteria 4, the property also embodies distinguishing characteristics of an architectural type specimen exceptionally valuable for the study of a period and style. Specifically, the property is one of the most significant examples of Park Service Modern architectural style. This style relates to contemporary American modernism, and Anshen and Alien were among the most important American modern architects. The Quarry Visitor Center was one of this firms’ two most important early commissions (the other is the Sedona Chapel in Arizona). The Quarry Visitor Center was an early, precedent setting example of the new, modern style embraced by the Park Service as part of Mission 66. More than any other early Mission 66 visitor center, it legitimized modern architectural style for use in national parks. Advanced building technology, efficient materials, and labor-saving construction were also showcased by this benchmark project. The Quarry Visitor Center was the most powerful and influential early example of how modern construction techniques and architectural style could be appropriate and successful for national park development.
The Quarry Visitor Center is one of the four most significant examples of the particular strain of American modern architecture that can be described as Park Service Modern. Because of its significance as an example of American modern architecture of the period, the property possesses extraordinary national importance under NHL Criterion 4.
Origins of MISSION 66
In 1949, Newton B. Drury, Director of the National Park Service, described the national parks as “victims of the war.”4 Neglected since the New Deal era improvements of the 1930s, the national parks were in desperate need of funds for basic maintenance, not to mention protection from an increasing number of visitors. Between 1931 and 1948, total visits to the national park system jumped from about 3,500,000 to almost 30,000,000, but park facilities remained essentially as they were before the war. Meeting the increased need for visitor services required significantly larger appropriations from Congress. Throughout his tenure, however, Drury remained unable to obtain adequate appropriations to change the situation.5 In 1951, Conrad L. Wirth took over as director of the Park Service, but at least at first, funding levels continued to lag behind the perceived need for new, enlarged, or renovated park facilities.
The conditions Drury had described in 1949 soon became a subject of public concern, not to mention ridicule. Social critic Bernard DeVoto led the crusade for park improvement with an article in his Harper’s column, “The Easy Chair,” entitled “Let’s Close the National Parks,” which suggested keeping the parks closed to the public until funds could be found to maintain them properly. The story caught the attention of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., a longtime national park supporter, who wrote to President Eisenhower of his concern over this potential “national tragedy.” Eisenhower’s staff responded with a standard apology, but Rockefeller’s letter did cause the President to request a briefing from Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay on conditions in the parks. As the need for massive “renovation” of the Park Service entered the public forum and reached the President’s desk, the Park Service’s pressing maintenance problems continued to mount.
During the summer of 1954, Department of the Interior Undersecretary Ralph Tudor began a reorganization of his department. According to historian Elmo Richardson, the reorganization allowed Conrad Wirth to focus attention on the crisis within the Park Service. Once the door was open, Wirth had an opportunity to begin to press ambitious proposals for increased funding to redress long-standing inadequacies within his agency. Director Wirth’s own recollection of his initial idea for what became known as “Mission 66” is fittingly more dramatic. In his memoir, Parks, Politics and the People, Wirth remembers one “weekend in February, 1955” when he conceived of a comprehensive program to launch the Park Service into the modern age. Rather than submit a yearly budget, as in the past, Wirth would ask for an entire decade of funding that would total hundreds of millions of dollars. Inspired perhaps by other multi-year federal initiatives (particularly in public housing and highway construction), Mission 66 would allow the Park Service to repair and build roads, bridges and trails, hire additional employees, construct new facilities ranging from campsites to administration buildings, improve employee housing, and obtain land for future parks. The new program would result in a fully modernized national park system in time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Park Service in 1966.
Early in 1955, Wirth organized two Park Service committees to plan the Mission 66 program: a steering committee to develop and oversee the planning process, and a Mission 66 committee to make the specific proposals for the program. Representatives from several branches of the Park Service devoted themselves full-time to the project. Lemuel Garrison put aside his new appointment as chief of conservation and protection to act as chairman of the steering committee. In his memoirs, Garrison captures the energy behind the mission and its fearless confrontation of park problems. Each superintendent was asked to write a list of “everything needed to put ‘his’ park facilities into immediate condition for managing the current visitor load, while protecting the park itself.” They were also to estimate the number of visitors ten years in the future. The Mission 66 staff derived a list of priorities for determining park needs to assist superintendents in their assessments. One result of the project was the development of standards throughout the system. Each park was to have a uniform entrance marker listing park resources, a minimum number of employees, paved trails to popular points of interest, and other basic amenities. Visitors could expect the same basic facilities in every park.
Wirth’s preliminary planning of the Mission 66 program was geared toward promotion and, by necessity, selling his idea to Congress and the Eisenhower Administration. The Mission 66 staff was to produce a basic outline of the program for the Public Service Conference at Great Smoky Mountains on September 18, 1955. Since a meeting with Eisenhower had been scheduled for May, Wirth hoped to keep details of “Mission 66” confidential until then. However, news of the program leaked out after the Great Smokies conference, which only increased public interest in the program. After several dry runs and administrative delays, Wirth introduced Mission 66 to the President and his cabinet on January 27, 1956. The program received immediate approval, and Mission 66 was officially introduced to the public at an American Pioneer Dinner held at the Department of the Interior on February 8. Highlights of this event included a presentation by Wirth, a Walt Disney movie entitled “Adventure in the National Parks,” and the circulation of Our Heritage, a promotional booklet describing the Mission 66 program. Wirth himself was involved in every detail of the carefully orchestrated publicity that followed.
Modern Architecture and the National Parks
Even before Mission 66 planning began, the Park Service planners and architects were moving away from the traditional “rustic” construction that had characterized prewar park development. There were many reasons for this shift, which mirrored national trends in architectural style, construction technology, and planning policies.
Mission 66 reached the drawing boards in the mid-1950s, at a time when modern architecture had reached the mainstream of American architectural design. Conrad Wirth was trained as a landscape architect in the 1920s, and in the 1930s he had been responsible for the Park Service’s state park development program. His chief of planning and design, Thomas C. Vint, had been chief landscape architect since 1927 and was one of the originators of the Park Service rustic style. Other Park Service designers active in the 1950s, such as architect Cecil Doty, had been principal Park Service designers during the rustic era. But if in many ways this group continued the tradition of park planning and design that they had created over the previous decades, in other ways, postwar conditions, changing ideas about nature, and new practices in the construction industry necessitated new approaches. Mission 66 designers needed to find new ways for park development to “harmonize” with park settings.
As the negative effects of larger numbers of visitors and their vehicles began to be better understood, for example, Mission 66 planners responded by centralizing services and controlling visitor “flow” in what were called “visitor centers.” In some cases, planners proposed removing some park facilities and relying on motels and other businesses springing up in gateway communities to serve visitors. Enlarging parking lots and widening roads encouraged this trend, since faster roads made access in and out of parks quicker. However, under Mission 66, parking lots, comfort stations, gas stations, and other visitor services were bound to proliferate, in any case. Conrad Wirth remained firmly committed to the idea that the parks were “for the people.” Mission 66 planning proceeded under the long-standing assumption at the Park Service that increased numbers of visitors (and their cars) should be accommodated. Modernized and expanded park development, usually restricted to existing road corridors within the parks, was therefore proposed as the essential means of preserving nature to the greatest degree possible, while making sure visitors were not turned away.
But if Mission 66 continued traditional assumptions, it also exploited the functional advantages offered by postwar architectural theory and construction techniques. Mission 66 architects (whether in-house or consultants) employed free plans, flat roofs, and other established elements of modern design in order to create spaces in which large numbers of visitors could circulate easily and locate essential services efficiently. The architects also used concrete construction and prefabricated components for buildings, highways, and other structures. Development was often sited according to new criteria, as well. Visitor centers were located according to functional concerns relating to park circulation, and so were not calculated as components of larger landscape compositions. Although Mission 66 park development was no longer truly part of the landscape, in this sense, in many cases this meant that buildings could be sited less obtrusively near park entrances or along main roads within the park. Stone veneers, earth- toned colors, and low, horizontal massing also helped continue the tradition of reducing visual contrasts between building and site. Mission 66 architecture was not picturesque or rustic, but it did “harmonize” with its setting (at least in more successful examples), although in a new way. Stripped of the ornamentation and associations of rustic design, Mission 66 development could be both more understated and more efficient than rustic buildings.
Park Service designers were following a nearly ubiquitous, international trend in postwar architecture. Changing styles, changes in architectural training, and perhaps above all, changes in the technology and economics of construction fueled the new trend. But the prospect of abandoning traditional “rustic” architectural design in national parks still provoked an outcry from critics. One of the most outspoken critics of modern architecture in national parks was Devereux Butcher of the National Parks Association. As early as 1952, Butcher wrote of his horror at finding contemporary buildings in Great Smokey Mountains and Everglades national parks and criticized the Park Service for abandoning its “long- established policy of designing buildings that harmonize with their environment and with existing styles.” Among the eyesores he discovered was a curio store with “blazing red roof and hideous design,” a residence “ugly beyond words to describe,” and a utility building that he felt might as well have been a factory. Later in the decade, David Brower and Ansel Adams joined Butcher in condemning such park development, although these critics focused more on issues of resource conservation than architectural style.
Despite the criticism of Butcher and others, the Park Service felt it had remained consistent with its tradition of architectural design in harmony with the surrounding landscape. In fact, the design methodology behind the use of rustic architecture was adapted to explain contemporary design decisions. According to Director Wirth, Mission 66 buildings were intended to blend into the landscape, but through their plainness rather than by identification with natural features. Even the qualities that defined rustic architecture might draw attention to a building intended to serve a practical function. The Park Service communicated this architectural philosophy in its early promotional literature, as well as in its relations with the national media. In August 1956, Architectural Record reported that Mission 66 would produce “simple contemporary buildings that perform their assigned function and respect their environment.” The magazine also emphasized that while this policy had traditionally led to the use of stone and redwood, “preliminary designs for the newer buildings show a trend toward more liberal use of steel and glass.”
Within the Park Service, architects appear to have embraced the opportunity to modernize facilities and experiment with new design concepts. For example, Cecil Doty had designed a rustic masterpiece, the Santa Fe Headquarters building, in 1937. By the early 1950s, however, he recalled “a change in philosophy… . That’s why you started seeing [concrete] block in a lot of things. We couldn’t help but change…. I can’t understand how anyone could think otherwise, how it could keep from changing.” Doty’s statement provides a key to understanding the legacy of Mission 66 architecture, the purpose of which was not to design buildings for atmosphere, whimsy or aesthetic pleasure, but for change: to meet the demands of an estimated eighty million visitors by 1966, to anticipate the requirements of modern transportation, and to exercise the potential of new construction technology. As Director Wirth explained, the Park Service not only had to serve greater numbers of visitors, but to understand their increased need for appropriate facilities. The “stress and restless activity of this machine age, when man is sending satellites spinning into orbit around the sun and our own earth” required more frequent renewal in “the peace and solitude offered by nature.”18 Even critics agreed that some kind of efficient action was necessary to bring the parks up to contemporary standards.
Mission 66 planners and administrators were also clearly caught up in the enthusiasm of the modern movement. Wirth told his steering committee to be “as objective as possible. Each was to be free to question anything if he thought a better way could be found. Nothing was to be sacred except the ultimate purpose to be served. Man, methods, and time-honored practices were to be accorded no vested deference.” A writer for Architectural Record expressed this sense of limitless potential for park architecture in 1957:
Let us not decide, just because we cannot draw it on the back of an envelope, that the great and sympathetic architecture cannot exist… The whole habit of thinking in the parks is the other way. We have not dared to let man design in the parks; we have not asked to see what he might do. We have slapped his hand and told him not to try anything.
But the acceptance of modernism and its use in the parks was also a matter of urgency and economics. The Park Service needed to serve huge numbers of people as quickly as possible, and, despite increased funding, it had to do so on a limited budget. The often less expensive materials that composed modern buildings (steel, concrete, glass) allowed more facilities to be built for more parks. In its publication, Grist, the Park Service praised concrete as “low-cost, long-lived beauty treatment for parks.” Asphalt was “nature’s own product for nature’s preserves,” and asbestos-cement products “building materials for beauty, economy, permanence.”
Despite the general acceptance of modernism, Americans were still unfamiliar with modern architecture in national parks. When, in the mid-1950s, The New York Times reported on the controversy surrounding Gilbert Stanley Underwood’s Jackson Lake Lodge, the reporter emphasized the contrast between the new concrete building and the area’s wild west tradition, noting that “sheepmen,” “naturalists,” and “gamblers.. .now heatedly discuss the pros and cons of modern architecture.” Nevertheless, the Times clearly admired “the artful blend of comfortable modern with western” even as critics called it “a slab sided concrete abomination.” The Virginian Pilot was more conservative in its coverage of the “modern trend in architectural ideas” exhibited in the shade structures at Coquina Beach, Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Although Park Service architect Donald F. Benson received a Progressive Architecture award citation for the design, the paper warned that, “until people get used to the modern trend,” the new shelters would “cause as much comment as three nude men on a Republican Convention Program.” The Coquina facilities (destroyed by a storm in the early 1990s) soon became among the most widely praised designs of the Mission 66 era.
The Park Service accepted modernism at a time when the new tradition had aged, and its post-modern backlash not yet emerged. The visitor center designed by Mitchell/Giurgola for the Wright Brothers Memorial was featured in a “news report” in Progressive Architecture suggesting that the Park Service had finally caught up with the standard required by the modern visitor. “The design of visitors’ facilities provided for national tourist attractions seems to be decidedly on the upgrade, at least as far as the work for National Park Service is concerned. One hopes that the rustic-rock snuggery and giant-size ‘log cabin’ previously favored” are disappearing. That the progressive periodical chose two visitor centers to “exemplify new park architecture” was not surprising. The Park Service intended for the new visitor center buildings to represent the values and results of its system wide development campaign.
Developing a New Building Type: The “Visitor Center”
Even before the commencement of the Mission 66 building program, the Park Service had begun to develop a new type of visitor facility, eventually known as the “visitor center.” Our Heritage described the visitor center as “one of the most pressing needs, and one of the most useful facilities for helping the visitor to see the park and enjoy his visit.” Visitor centers were lauded as “the center of the entire information and public service program for a park.” One hundred and nine visitor centers were slated for construction over the ten-year period. This new type of park facility would not only embody new park visitor management policies, but also the spirit of Mission 66, which looked forward to an efficient Park Service for the modern age.
During the early 1950s, Park Service architects and planners began developing a centralized service facility that would help manage increased visitations. The updated facility, equipped with basic services and educational exhibits, was known in its early stages as an “administrative-museum building,” “public service building,” or “public use building.” As this range of labels suggests, the Park Service was struggling not only to combine museum services and administrative facilities but to develop a new building type that would supplement old-fashioned museum exhibits with modern methods of interpretation. In February 1956, Director Wirth issued a memorandum to help clarify the use of terminology applied to the new buildings, explaining that “there are differences in the descriptive title, although most of the buildings are similar in purpose, character and use.” From then on, Wirth expected park staff to use “visitor center” for every such facility, even “in place of Park Headquarters when it is a major point of visitor concentration.” As late as 1958, however, the matter remained unclear to many park visitors. When the topic was raised at a design conference, it was noted that “the term ‘Visitor Center’ is sometimes confusing to the public as it is an unusual and specialized facility which may be associated with shopping centers with which the general public is familiar.” If still puzzling to some, the building’s label emphasized the novelty of the visitor center and bolstered the Park Service’s image with high-profile examples of Mission 66 progress
The Custer Battlefield museum & administration building, designed by Daniel M. Robbins & Associates of Omaha, demonstrates the transition from early Park Service museum buildings to standard Mission 66 visitor centers. The building was constructed in 1950, the first year since World War II that congressional appropriations for the parks included museum funding. A lobby space and offices were incorporated into the new museum, but orientation areas remained small; no audio-visual or auditorium space was included and restrooms were relegated to the basement. Visitor circulation between the various areas does not appear to have been a major consideration. The Department of the Interior Annual Report for 1953 announced the commencement of “the first major public use development at Flamingo, on Florida Bay,” which would consist of “a boat basin and other developments.. .camping and picnic facilities, dock and shelter building, roads, and water and sewer systems.” At this time, “public use” was still a general term, applicable to a marina or an interpretive facility. The report also noted “administration and public-use buildings at Joshua Tree and Saguaro National Monuments, and utility buildings in Potomac Park, Washington, D.C., and at Death Valley National Monument.” Other early precedents for visitor centers included the public information centers at Yorktown and Jamestown.
The public use building planned for Carlsbad Caverns in July 1953, underwent the transition to visitor center during its design and construction. Preliminary drawings for the building were produced by the Office of Design and Construction in Washington, D.C., before the creation of the eastern and western design offices. Thomas C. Vint, chief of the Washington office, signed off on the proposal for a streamlined, two-story public use building with steel and glass facade. It featured a central lobby area and, on the left side, a coffee shop/fountain/dining room, curio store, and kitchen. The museum and auditorium were entered from the right side of the lobby, which included the women’s restroom. Park Service offices were in the basement, along with the men’s restroom, and on the second floor, where they overlooked the double-height lobby. By December 1954, a more detailed preliminary design for the Carlsbad Caverns facility had been drafted in which the entrance lobby was attached to a lounge area
on the right side surrounded by restrooms, an exhibit space, and a ticket booth. The concession area was further defined as a curio shop, coffee shop, nursery, playroom, kitchen, and offices. This design incorporated an existing elevator building constructed in 1932, and one wing of the new facility was built by the concessioner, the Cavern Supply Company, with guidance from the Mission 66 staff. The 1955 Annual Report called it “a public use building and elevator lobby, museum and naturalists’ offices.” By January 1956, “the Public Use Building was in the final stage of preparation,” but when bids for construction were opened in March, the building was referred to as a visitor center. In his dedication speech nearly three years later, Conrad Wirth praised the Carlsbad Caverns Visitor Center for its use of “modern design” and “modern high-speed passenger elevators.
Early proposals for the public use building at Grand Canyon suggest a similar struggle with programmatic aspects of the new facility. Preliminary drawings of the building were produced in 1954, with several proposals designed by Cecil Doty. Despite variations in planning, the front facade of the various proposals remained remarkably similar. The entrance area was mostly glass framed in decorative brick. The exhibit wing to the left was cement stucco, and the wing to the right either additional brick or stucco. The building was long and low, with little to attract attention except the flagpole and sign. By 1955, a courtyard scheme had been chosen for the floorplan, perhaps because its plan allowed for more flexible circulation. Visitors entered a lobby and were confronted with an information desk on their right, directly in front of the rangers and superintendents’ offices. The library and restrooms were straight ahead, and the exhibit space, lecture room, study collection/workshop, and offices arranged in clockwise procession around the courtyard. The public use building was an immediate source of pride for the Park Service, which praised this “visitor center” as “a one-stop service unit” in 1956. An information desk complete with uniformed ranger, lobby exhibits, an illustrated talk, and a park museum “where a great variety of exhibits, arranged in orderly and effective fashion” were among the many conveniences for the visitor. The presence of the park superintendent and naturalist was also considered remarkable, as were the study collection, workshop, and library. According to the Park Service, the new building provided much-needed efficiency and economy.
The use of the word “center” to describe these early visitor centers indicated the planners desire to centralize park interpretive and museum displays, new types of interpretive presentations, park administrative offices, restrooms, and various other facilities. The underlying theory relates to contemporary planning ideas such as shopping centers, corporate campuses, and industrial parks, all of which sought to give new civic form to emerging patterns of daily life and urban expansion in the late 1940s and 1950s. Like the shopping center, the visitor center made it possible for people to park their cars at a central point, and from there have access to a range of services or attractions. Earlier “park village” planning had typically been more decentralized, with different functions (museum, administrations building, comfort station) spread out in an arrangement of individual, rustic buildings. The Mission 66 visitor center brought these activities together in a single, larger building intended to serve as a control point for what planners called “visitor flow,” as well as a more efficient means of serving far larger numbers of visitors and cars in a more concentrated area. Centralized activities created a more efficient pattern of public use, and assured that even as their number grew to unprecedented levels, all visitors would receive basic orientation and services in the most efficient way possible.
Considering the commitment of Mission 66 era planners to accommodating the growing numbers of people who wanted to visit the parks, the centralized visitor center was an essential approach to park preservation. The visitor center facilitated, yet concentrated, public activities and so helped prevent more random, destructive patterns of use. The siting of visitor centers was determined by new considerations in park master planning that involved the circulation of unprecedented numbers of people and cars. While on the one hand the Park Service remained committed to making the parks accessible to all who wanted to use them, on the other agency planners also felt it was desirable to continue to concentrate automotive access in relatively narrow areas and road corridors, most of which were already developed for the purpose. As a result, Mission 66 development plans (at least in older parks) usually called for the intensification of development in existing front country areas, rather than opening back country areas to new uses. This implied road widenings, the expansion of campgrounds and parking lots, and often, the construction of a new visitor center. The visitor center was therefore sited in relation to the overall park circulation plan, in order to efficiently intercept visitor traffic. These criteria for siting Mission 66 visitor centers differed significantly from the criteria for siting and designing the rustic park villages and museums of the prewar era.
The Visitor Center and Mission 66
The planning and design of visitor centers began in the Park Service offices of design and construction in San Francisco (WODC) and Philadelphia (EODC). Both offices had been established as part of the Park Service’s reorganization in 1954, and both were overseen by the central planning and design office in Washington, D.C. Neither the WODC nor the EODC was prepared for the quantity of work Mission 66 would bring to the drawing boards. Rather than hire additional architects and landscape architects who would have to be laid off at the conclusion of Mission 66, the Park Service planned to contract out work to private firms on a project by project basis. In most cases, the Park Service furnished contract architects with preliminary drawings, which the consultants would then use as the basis for the developed design and contract drawings. In some cases, consultants simply provided the contract drawings for designs that had been fully developed in-house. Visitor centers were typically the most expensive new buildings in the parks, as well as high-profile commissions, and therefore attractive to private consulting firms.
Whether or not consulting architects were employed, in all projects the Park Service retained control over the location of buildings and, in many cases, significant aspects of the consulting firm’s design. The planning of early visitor centers reflected the Mission 66 concern with protection and use, the idea that park development provided the key to preservation. According to the 1955 Annual Report, the Park Service decided to locate administration offices, warehouses, shops, and residences away from areas devoted to visitors, creating separate “zones” for maintenance, employee housing, administration, and visitor services. Location within the park was also an important interpretive issue. Planners debated whether visitor centers provided better visitor orientation from a location near the entrance to the park, or were more effective near a significant feature that visitors would want to see and know more about. In some cases, this issue was resolved by creating secondary visitor centers, which were usually little more than a single exhibit space equipped with restrooms.
Throughout the Mission 66 period, the Park Service’s overriding goal for its visitor centers was to improve interpretation and stimulate public interest in the park. To do this, the park’s “story” was to be told as clearly and effectively as possible. Historians and interpreters played crucial roles in the Mission 66 planning process. According to Robert Utley, chief historian for the Park Service beginning in 1964, historians such as Roy Appleman and Ronald Lee favored siting visitor centers “right on top of the resource” so that visitors could “see virtually everything from the visitor center.” The location of visitor centers in sensitive areas often occurred at cultural sites and battlefields, where the purpose of the visitor’s trip to the site was to gain a fairly comprehensive understanding of an important historic event. The preservation of cultural and natural resources sometimes became a concern, but was rarely articulated, according to Utley. The siting of a visitor center among the ruined structures at Fort Union, for example, was deemed advantageous for interpretation. During the Mission 66 period, the Park Service strove to educate the public, sometimes even at the expense of encroaching on the historical or natural environment. Mission 66 historians and planners believed that more effective public education justified such encroachments, and that resulting understanding of sites would lead to greater support for preservation. But if this priority meant sometimes siting visitor centers in sensitive areas, it did not extend to other types of development. Director Wirth emphasized that “definite steps were taken to move as many of the administrative, government housing, and utility buildings and shops as possible out of the national parks to reduce their interference with the enjoyment of park visitors.”
Within the visitor center building, Park Service designers faced the challenge of orienting visitors and directing them to desired services. These design decisions also affected visitor impacts on park resources. The visitor center was considered “the hub of the park interpretive program,” and a method of orienting park visitors who “lacking these services, drive almost aimlessly about the parks without adequate benefit and enjoyment from their trips.” Not only was the visitor center a signpost intended to attract the aimless visitor within, but also a method of distributing information and other services in the most efficient and significant manner. Park Service architects confronted such issues in the development of building “circulation” or “flow” diagrams. Visitor circulation patterns were particularly important in this type of building, because people were expected to use the building in different ways; while some would study the exhibits and watch the films, others were only interested in visiting the restrooms or purchasing a park map. At this early date, Park Service architects had no precedents for use patterns, and, therefore, only a vague idea of how the new buildings would function.
