Architecture and the American Ski Resort
An Architectural History of the American Ski Resort
Why did the American winter recreation industry start up during the country’s worst depression? How did postwar America ski resorts challenge the supremacy of European alpine ones? When did a second home and a winter vacation become the American Dream? How did the environmental movement push back American’s pursuit of a leisure lifestyle in the mountains? Why did recreational design become a critical task of an expanding architectural profession in the second half of the twentieth century?
Those questions, and more, are addressed in Architecture and the American Ski Resort, a book which is part cultural critique, part architectural history, and part ski industry chronicle. It examines, through the lens of destination ski resorts in New England, the Rocky Mountains, and the Far West, the rise of recreational tourism and themed architecture from the 1930s to 1990. The topic signals “luxury,” yet the treatment provides a framework for understanding a phenomenon encompassing sport and culture that dramatically altered America’s mountain landscapes and for contextualizing our knowledge of postwar architectural practice.
The book has a front story—ski resort design, “theatres of sport,” focusing on the people who created the architecturally scripted spaces and recreational landscapes keyed to tourist expectations—and a back story, the increased desire for a leisure-oriented lifestyle that characterized prospering Americans in the 2nd half of the 20th century.
An underlying theme is that resort skiing is a microcosm of the American experience—a taste for fast living, a swift ascent, overreaching, a thudding downfall, starting up all over again. It is quite a story, and one that looks increasingly like “history” as America faces sobering economic realities. Starting as a history of ski resort architecture, the book evolved into a new narrative of postwar architectural practice as the profession expanded to include large-scale recreational planning. A major contribution is identifying the many architects, landscape architects, and planners—such as William Wurster, Herbert Bayer, Fritz Benedict, Henrik Bull, Eldon Beck, and Graham Gund--who engaged in mountain resort design. Of the 150 architects in the text, many are renowned. Others are regionally known. Some specialized in mountain architecture and deserve to be better known.
In researching this project, I have interviewed practically every living ski area developer (several, such as Vail’s Peter Seibert and Stratton’s Frank Snyder are now dead) and many of the architects and landscape designers. The visuals include 200 photographs obtained from the resorts, the architects, and photographers such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Julius Shulman, and Ezra Stoller. Key figures—Averell Harriman and Gary Cooper at Sun Valley, Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke at the Aspen Music Festival, Waterville Valley’s Tom Corcoran winning the Roch cup, Snowbird’s Ted Johnson on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and Sundance’s Robert Redford on the cover of Ski magazine—appear throughout the text.
This book is the first to construct an architectural history of American ski resorts from a national perspective, to consider the influence of the recreational architecture on American culture, and to critique the consequences of their constructed landscapes.