Mary Colter

Last Christmas, I read a good bit on architect and designer Mary Colter (1869--1958).

I think she was really ahead of her time in so many ways, and I love the way she used her buildings to tell stories and inspire others. Her work, combining the efforts of local artisans and her own anthropological efforts, is truly art on a grand, though-provoking scale.

Scott and I have visited several of her works, including (my favorite) La Posada in Winslow, AZ and her three Grand Canyon masterpieces -- the Watchtower, el Tovar and the Hopi House trading post.

For my own inspiration in our upcoming renovation, I'm recording a few of the notes that I found most interesting. Perhaps we'll incorporate a little bit of her genius into our work!



MARY COLTER,
ARCHITECT OF THE SOUTHWEST
 (by Arnold Berke)

• She possessed a special genius for interpreting the past to create new buildings and interiors that, with their striking forms and fanciful atmosphere, have enchanted generations of travelers crossing the American Southwest.
• MC was an exceptional person who pioneered both as an architect and as a woman.
• Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter was an architect and interior designer who spent virtually her entire career working simultaneously for the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway. The two companies worked in tandem, using Colter's innovative designs to help make the West pleasurably accessible to travelers for whom it was starkly but alluringly new.
• Colter designed buildings not just to lodge, feed or otherwise serve these travelers but also to entertain and engage them; she invariable sought to delight the eye and occupy the mind. Her works are beguiling stage sets rooted so masterfully in the history of the region that they seem to be genuine remnants of that history.
• Well-educated and employed as a teacher for years in her early adulthood, Colter remained a lifelong student of art history, natural history, and human civilization. Through her buildings she conveyed that learning, like a teacher, to the traveler.
• Her buildings emerge effortlessly from their sites, and even when new, usually affected a look of age ...  Colter's enduring charge was to delight and comfort the traveling public.
• Colter was the quintessential practitioner of the Arts & Crafts movement (LF McClelland).
• Pioneer in architecture, she left her mark in the architectural world, national parks like the Grand Canyon, and railroad town throughout the southwest. Her story intertwines with the Harvey Girls and Fred Harvey, the Santa Fe Railway, the Arts & Crafts movement, and in presenting the Native American/Indigenous style to travelers.