NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Park and Recreation Structures

EVEN IN THE LACK of any current demand for such a building, probably the preliminary development plans for natural parks, with but few exceptions, should designate a suitable location "Future Park Lodge." This is a reasonable sort of advance planning—a kind of hedge or insurance against an unseen future. But just as insurance coverage does not dispose us to seek out fire, shipwreck, or sudden death in order that the full benefits of our policy may be enjoyed, long or eternally deferred use of a potential site for a park lodge, inn, or hotel is nothing to lament.

Much speculation has long centered around the academic question whether the chicken or the egg came first. As between a demand for meals and overnight lodging in a park and the creation of some structure to supply them, there is no debating priority. Demand, not clairvoyantly perceived, but manifest, recurrent, and inescapable, should precede the hatching of any lodge project. Badly confused in his doctrine is the park authority or park planner who thinks he becomes an apostle of advance planning by rushing headlong into the building of a lodge on a public preserve that, in order to promote a semblance of patronage, must depend on ballyhoo by billboard. Not only are the gears of his thinking in reverse, but they give every indication of being badly jammed.

In respect to park buildings generally, it has been many times stated that only urgent need is valid reason for intruding them. In the case of minor structures a breach of this tenet is bad enough. An unrequired shelter, or bench, or picnic unit is a sorry monument to loose planning and miscalculation, but the carrying charges are trivial compared with the staggering losses a park lodge can roll up when it labors under a less-than-capacity patronage. As between accepting an operating deficit and the vain alternative of attempting to reduce or eliminate it by overcharging the less-than-capacity patronage, there is little choice, for both are indefensible.

Since the use of parks is predominantly a daytime one, the only justification for providing overnight accommodations in them is the facilitating of daytime use. There is a distortion of proper objective where overnight accommodations are provided in excess of the actual needs of bona fide park patrons. For those who would arrive at dusk, pass the night, and depart at daybreak, park environment seems hardly an essential. A tourist camp, commercially operated on the highway, can function in supply of their needs. Overnight facilities within a park should essay to serve, not speeding passers-by, but visitors who mean to avail themselves of the typical enjoyments the park can offer. Such accommodation should be incidental to the use of the park, not to the use of the highway.

Any natural park worthy the name will not jeopardize its standards and expose itself to misuse by admitting within its boundaries commercial enterprise that is not dedicated to serving the fundamental purpose and best interests of the park.

The appropriateness of locating a lodge or hotel in a natural park of distinction will be vehemently denied by some who feel that this facility brings a too civilizing influence into any area where retention of primitive aspect is an aim. It will be as stoutly defended by others who plead greater accessibility of natural beauty as the gain. Probably there can never be anything approaching unanimity of opinion on this basic point. Likewise the scale on which lodges may properly be undertaken will be variously argued. Once, however, the construction of such a facility has been authorized and the capacity of it has been determined on the basis of carefully analyzed need, there can perhaps be a certain harmony of viewpoint as regards the theory, form, and details of the structure.

One scheme of development is a central building containing a lounge, dining room, kitchen, and related dependencies, surrounded by individual cabins which provide the sleeping accommodations. In any but a minor development this means many trivial buildings close-crowded in an intensively used area. Such a result is now very generally felt to be subversive of natural park values and therefore bad planning. Moreover, authorities who have made careful studies state that individual cabins are more expensive to operate and maintain than equivalent sleeping accommodations integral with the central structure. Complication of supervision, distances involved in servicing, and, in some climates, the burden of heating a great number of separate units are among the affecting factors.

But the combining of all sleeping accommodations and all functions of the lodge proper under one roof likewise can be criticized when in size the building grows beyond what can be termed a minor development. Somehow or other large buildings in parks appear to be subject to some natural law—increase in volume tends to amplify static interference and cause harmony to fade. The park planner, asked to devise extensive overnight accommodations that are not painfully obtrusive, finds himself in a quandary.

Luckily for parks, there lies between the two extreme courses just described a truly happy mean which, by reducing the appalling number of cabin structures of the one and the offending size of the single building of the other, can avoid the chief disadvantages and retain the points of merit of both. Such a solution is a central lodge limited to lounge, dining room, kitchen, and directly related dependencies, surrounded, not by innumerable individual cabins regimented in a lay-out inspired by the monotony of cross section paper, but by multiple cabins (discussed in the chapter preceding), in some appropriate informal arrangement born of mating imagination, and not geometry, with the site factor. A few low, rambling buildings are more soothing than either a multitude of insignificant voting booth structures in a parking lot congestion, or any rendering in Rustic Renaissance jealously competing with the magnitude of Versailles.

In planning extensive lodge developments in this recommended "middle-of-the-road" approach, it is not necessary to limit the multiple housing units to four rooms, although four-room units make possible two exposures for all rooms. When the units contain more than four rooms, this desirable feature must usually be sacrificed. The more extended the development, the larger should be the housing units in order to maintain a proper scale relationship.

The lodge proper can be connected with the surrounding multiple cabins by covered walkways so that even the most remotely housed guest, by traversing the cabin porches and the covered connecting walks, enjoys overhead protection in travel between his room and the facilities located in the lodge.

These sprawling groups need not be stamped with monotony if there is judicious combining of various materials and varied forms. Nowhere are the potentialities for interest based on a variety of materials and forms more completely realized than in the Bright Angel Lodge and its connected dependencies on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. The resulting informality of the ensemble is appealing in the extreme, deserving of close study, and should inspire those charged with the design of large-scale overnight housing in parks with a deep desire to create informal individuality of regional flavor in an equivalent degree.

No minor part of the satisfaction experienced on viewing that pleasing development is the contribution made by the long, low, horizontal lines of the buildings. Not less than mandatory in that particular location, the low, horizontal feeling there produced would be the appropriate note in almost any natural park setting one could imagine. The advantage invariably deriving from low height is not restricted to grouped buildings as represented by the Bright Angel Lodge. It has similar importance in the altogether satisfying smaller, single-structure lodge developments at Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park and at Petit Jean State Park, Arkansas, both of which are pictured.

There are other characteristics and features, not so major as low horizontality, yet not to be overlooked if, in creating in parks large-scale overnight use structures, something well-differentiated from such facilities as built in cities is to result. It is no light assignment for a designer to be asked to retain the substance of comfort while cutting loose from the evidence of sophistication; nevertheless, that probably analyzes the accomplishment in the illustrated park lodges that readers will most admire.

When the weather turns cold, the guest in the park lodge in the most primitive area will demand well-circulated heat. Even while he is warmed in the comfort of a central heating system, he will be further warmed by the wish-fathered thought that he is miles away from such things as radiators. He will revel in the glow of generously scaled fireplaces, so these must be generously provided in the lodge. He will enjoy originating the thesis that the primitive fireplace was tops in comfort—as long as radiators are at his back, and are not too conspicuous. In a cold climate some auxiliary means of really heating the atmosphere that fireplaces psychologically create cannot be omitted from a lodge that is other than a summer season affair.

The matter of heating is but one item among many. In other details guests will expect the park lodge to be a photograph of all that is primitive—touched up, however, so that all the harsh discomforts that accompany the truly primitive anywhere are somehow obliterated. In the designing of a lodge the stressing of primitive aspect and the disguising of the more major modern comforts combine to produce a problem difficult indeed. The many gadgety conveniences common to urban and pseudo-urban hotels, if incorporated in the wilderness lodge, will only complicate the problem and so have no place in such a development.

In most localities porches and terraces in connection with lodges will be much used. Guests are in the park presumably to enjoy the out-of-doors, and porches and terraces are a means to that end. To function to the best advantage, they should look out on any distant views and points of interest offered.

The two attractive minor structures pictured directly below are accessories of a lodge-with-cabins development. One is a telephone booth, the other a transformer building that includes a telephone booth. The telephones supply communication between the outlying cabins and the lodge proper.

Transformer Building, Grand Canyon National Park

Telephone Booth, Grand Canyon National Park

• Plate III C—1 — Plate III C—15