Mary Colter
Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter (* April 4, 1869 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, † January 8, 1958 ) was an American architect.
As a child, Mary Colter traveled with her family in the years after the American Civil War through the borders of Minnesota, Colorado and Texas. After her father died in 1886, she attended the California School of Design in San Francisco. 1901 offered her the Fred Harvey Company ( the developer of the famous Harvey Houses ) on a job to set up the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque. Colter stepped up to their full-time job for the company in 1910 and moved at the same time from the post of interior designer in an architects office.
In the next thirty years she worked as one of the few female architects and under harsh conditions and supervised 21 projects for the entrepreneur Fred Harvey. She created a number of hotels and accommodation facilities for business in the southwestern United States, including the La Posada, and in 1922 erected Phantom Ranch building at the foot of the Grand Canyon, and five building complexes on the southern edge of the Grand Canyon: the Hopi House (1905 ), Hermit 's Rest (1914), the Oberservatorium Lookout Studio ( 1914), the 21 m high Desert View Watchtower (1932 ) with its hidden steel structure, and the Bright Angel Lodge (1935 ); Colter sets up the El Tovar Hotel, but not designed it.
Your employer Fred Harvey conquered the west along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway through the strategic use of pretty girl with high-necked collar, tourism and souvenirs. He had anthropologists in personnel to track the Indian art forms and artifacts such as pottery, jewelry and leather work. He had merchants in the personnel that should redesign these artifacts into commercially viable products. And he had Mary Colter, the unique architecture created at strategic locations and was intent on authenticity. She developed floor plans that stood for good user experience and potential function and a playful sense and dramatic subject matter inside and out.
As a chain-smoking perfectionist, she took care of backgrounds and attractive shapes. Colter conceived Hermit 's Rest The Watchtower is a product of their travel and research, and they also took care about preparing a handbook for guides. And they changed the name to Phantom Ranch (from Roosevelt Ranch ) to produce a better mental picture.
The Bright Angel became the de facto model for subsequent National Park Service and CCC building in the following years, and thus influenced the look and feel of an entire architectural genre which some call the National Park Service Rustic. It created a precedent by using the locally available materials and daring, large format design elements. The use of field stones and rohbehauenem wood at the bottom of the Grand Canyon was the most practical thing one could do. The Bright Angel Lodge also has a remarkable " geological fireplace " in the history of the lodge room with rocks that are up to the ceiling from the floor in the same arrangement as the geological layers on the walls of the canyon.
Colter 's masterpiece was perhaps the El Navajo in 1923 in Gallup, New Mexico. Noteworthy was its forward-looking mixture of modern and Indian architecture and the embodiment of the Navajo sand paintings. Of all her works looked Colter, built in hacienda- style La Posada Hotel ( 1929) in Winslow, Arizona as their masterpiece. She created the entire hotel including the garden, furniture, porcelain - even the dress of the waitress. The ATSF the hotel closed in 1957 and converted it in the 1960s in an office building around. Fortunately, the hotel was recently converted back to its former size.
In her later career Colter designed the exorbitant station cafe and a modern cocktail bar at Union Station in Los Angeles, which is now locked with a padlock and only for occasional filming and LA Conservancy tours will be used. Colter began in 1948 in Santa Fe, New Mexico to rest and gave her collection of artifacts at the Mesa Verde National Park.