NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Park and Recreation Structures

THE FACILITATING BUILDINGS least contacted by the using public, those identified with equipment and maintenance of the park area, if properly located need make little effort in gesture to environment. Generally speaking, their best location is off the track beaten by park patrons, and if isolated and well-obscured these stepchildren among park structures need not suffer comparison with necessarily more self-conscious and better groomed members of the family.

This is not to say that these buildings should not be conveniently located. Inconspicuous convenience is the qualification. If such sites are not available, then these buildings must go in for protective coloration, and perhaps in greater degree than other buildings, for they are so completely non-recreational and without the saving grace of very apparent direct benefit to the public itself. Their reason for being is so inadequately sensed by the unanalytical public mind that their presence is more than likely to be subconsciously resented.

Typical facilitating buildings within parks provide in the main for the housing of trucks, road-conditioning and other equipment, tools and implements of many kinds, and for the storage of supplies, such as firewood, ice, maintenance materials, feed, explosives, gas and oil, and other items, the variety and quantity of which are dictated by the size, character, and geographic location of the park. The generic term is variously equipment, utility, maintenance, or service buildings; but it is clear that the species embraced include garages, woodsheds, storehouses, barns, shops, and numerous other structures.

Often provision must be made for the stabling of work horses, or of one or more saddle horses used by custodian, ranger, or others of the park personnel in the discharge of their duties. This leads to need for space in which to store wagons and feed. Shops equipped for the work of the motor mechanic, blacksmith, carpenter, and painter are essential to all large parks and extended park systems, and even in minor park areas the need for some space in which part-time work of these trades may be carried on should not be disregarded. There must be space available wherein picnic tables, signs, screens, and other items can be reconditioned, and a truck can be overhauled even though this be the only piece of automotive equipment in the park.

Mobile picnic tables and benches can require much storage space, if conditions affecting park policy dictate that these must be kept under roof during the winter months. An icehouse in which natural ice cut during the winter can be stored against summer demands is sometimes an economic requirement. Regardless of the apparent convenience to result from locating such a building on the shore of the lake from which the ice will be cut, the more valid claim of a shoreline spared such drastic infringement opposes this. It will be found that storage in reasonable proximity to the points where the ice will be used is equally convenient.

Probably in most remote parks wood is used to the exclusion of all other fuels and, where the winter season is long, cold, and rainy, a great quantity of cordwood must be on hand and much of it kept dry. This means a woodshed or shelter, usually. semienclosed to give protection against rains driven by the prevailing winds and perhaps also to bring a certain orderly form and appearance to a wood pile which otherwise would tend to be ragged and unsightly. Particularly in the parks of the Pacific Northwest are sizable woodsheds an accepted facility.

These and many other service space needs crop up so progressively during park development that the equipment and maintenance building or group seems always to be in process of change or in crying need of it. Indeed it is foolhardy to look upon the most carefully considered and planned initial structure as the fixed ultimate. It may serve perfectly the need of the moment. But there is nothing more legitimately subject to change than service and facilitating needs during the development of a park, and few parks are recorded as having finally passed that stage. The very choice of site for the service center should be predicated upon expansion possibilities beyond all reasonable limits to before seen at the start, and the wise technician will clearly visualize and cannily plan the initial structure as an extensible building, or as one unit with which others can be joined or grouped.

Probably the happiest and most forehanded visualization of the ultimate maintenance group is a square service courtyard surrounded by all the facilitating structures. If at the starting gong the required buildings utilize but one, or at most two, sides of the eventual courtyard, the planner need not feel regretful concern for its incompleteness. Time will correct that, and speedily. His concern might more profitably be for how the threat of future additions will be met after structures have raced their way to enclose all sides of the courtyard. He may almost find that to maintain any opening for access to the service court is his real problem.

The chief advantage of the "hollow square" plan is the confinement of maintenance activities and paraphernalia to an area that becomes ultimately screened from public view as the expanding structures proceed to enclose it. Cavernous openings for entrance of trucks and equipment, factorylike windows so necessary for proper lighting of work spaces—all the inharmonious and unparklike—can be made to open on the court, while the walls exposed to public view need not shout stridently the storage and maintenance activities within. This results in an opportunity to limit "eye appeal" construction, where this must be adopted, to the exposed outer walls, and to resort to strictly practicable and serviceable construction within the court. The "hollow square" serves also to accommodate and screen from view any equipment which need not be kept under roof. It masks the loading and unloading of supplies, the arrival and departure of work crews, and the other necessary activities which can be destructive of the visitor's primary desire for the illusion of Nature unaffected by man's contacts.

Indeed should the building of permanent buildings to hem in an "equipment corral" seem a distant prospect, it is often advantageous to complete the enclosure by means of a temporary (though it should be a substantial) stockade or other type of fence.

The park patron thus is fended from wandering into the activities of the maintenance base with which his recreational use is not properly involved; and limits are created to prevent a loose overflow of maintenance facilities into areas which the public should be privileged to claim for its own. Confined to their own fixed precinct, surrounded and obscured by their own requirements of structure, the activities and facilities which have to do with the mechanics of development and maintenance need not constitute a disfigurement of a preserve of Nature.

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