Beaver Meadows Visitor Center: Tested Allegiances

In June 1967, the National Park Service unveiled a new visitor center in Rocky Mountain National Park. Beaver Meadows Visitor Center was the manifestation of two conflicting loyalties: loyalty to National Park Service values and loyalty to the designers of the building as a whole. As part of the new Mission 66 initiative, the National Park Service incorporated centralized visitor centers which aligned with their utilitarian values and modest budget. In the case of Beaver Meadows Visitor Center, the visions of the building’s designers at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin directly conflicted with National Park Service visions. The furniture within Beaver Meadows perfectly embodies the compromises that had to be made to honor both loyalties in one space. One such example is the Oak Arm Chair, a functional piece that suited daily National Park Service visitor needs, but still maintained the trademark design aesthetic of Taliesin. In the pursuit of design excellence, Taliesin argued for a specific upholstery fabric for the Oak Arm Chair that was the perfect mix of “rust and rose." Design samples were exchanged back and forth in an attempt to marry the two loyalties harmoniously, but unfortunately the National Park Service could not afford Taliesin’s vision and instead turned to government supply catalogues to buy the majority of the visitor center’s furnishings. When Beaver Meadows Visitor Center opened its door to the public, Taliesin-designed pieces were left in the shadows by the mass-produced government furnishings. When you examine the pieces that survive today and the primary sources that accompany them, there is documented evidence of clashing loyalties in every small decision made to create the visitor center you see today.

In order to effectively communicate this dynamic between the two dominant entities, we used the digital tool, Scalar. Scalar is the most effective tool for presenting objects and their histories; its use of metadata allows users to make connections between seemingly opposing ideas. Website visitors have access to visual connections through various layout formats that offer different navigation experiences.This tool brings primary source documents, biographies, design histories, furniture acquisition records, and secondary source perspectives into conversation with one another to bring nuance to the history of Beaver Meadows. Users can follow the history chapter-by-chapter or they can build their own version of the narrative through tags and links to related primary sources. Scalar adds an additional method through which to analyze the conflicting loyalties that dominated Beaver Meadows Visitor Center.

Though Beaver Meadows Visitor Center presents a unified front today, its persisting value lies in the history of conflict that is embodied throughout the building. This visitor center is representative of institutional tensions that gripped the National Park Service during in the mid-twentieth century, as the Park Service reprioritized visitors as stakeholders in the national parks.