The Stanford campus is an outlier, seen by many to more resemble an Ivy League university than one on the West Coast. Part of it is institutional – Stanford is one of the few big, rich, elite, private, research universities that is not in the east, and part of it is the design – with a campus design by FL Olmsted, and the original quadrangle and buildings by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge (the permutation in which their name existed then), the successor firm to HH Richardson’s practice.

Olmsted’s plan is truly wonderful – a clear hierarchical system of axes, malls, quads, and open spaces, which organizes the placement of buildings. It is a very big and spread-out campus, and the effect of the initial vision as the university grew from a relatively small core out to its current extent is evident. Although there are places where this system was not rigorously followed in the postwar boom era, and places where the preponderance of cars undermines the character of the campus, it is easy to imagine how much worse the campus would be if there had not been this underlying order, and instead the campus plan was typical of postwar, car-oriented, curving, formless planning (cf. Solomon’s analysis of Magic Marker bubbles).

Despite this brilliant planning, in prior visits I’ve always found the Stanford campus to be a pretty uninteresting place. I couldn’t understand why it didn’t impress me more (Olmsted! Shepley Bullfinch Romanesque!), and now I think I’ve arrived at an answer – almost all of the buildings on campus are deeply mediocre. The campus plan put them in the right places, and they form these fairly consistent building walls which enclose the open spaces, but the buildings themselves vary from banal to embarrassing. It’s hard to understand how they acquired such consistently bad buildings, given the obvious amounts of money and effort put into each.

There is an underlying similarity to the mediocrity, which certainly came from building development standards, which limited building height, and specified common vocabulary elements and strategies which had to be used, such as symmetry, hipped tile roofs, and punched windows in masonry walls (or solid walls which appeared to be masonry), that derived from the original core complex of the campus. But then each new building manages to be bad in its own, special way. There is the tame Brutalist building, which valiantly tries to hide its tile roof with a glazed, hipped porch at the perimeter.

There is the one by Bob Stern that plays the game of the smooth skin emerging from the rusticated base (which mimics the original buildings); but it makes too big a deal out of the arched entry, and tacks on an unnecessary apse on the end, looking a lot like a bank building along a highway in Tampa.

There is the modernist cliché pastiche building, by Pei’s office, where they have given up on making a coherent design, and have opted for a series of aedicular elements, breaking the façade into distinctly articulated pieces resembling a streetscape (but tied together by a feeble cornice element). Each piece is ill-proportioned, boring, flat and static, but then they attempt to punctuate the whole by inserting an overblown glass shard staircase, which appears to never be used.

There is the hyper structurally-expressive Brutalist example, with its massive concrete frames superintending a hierarchy of secondary elements and curtain wall sections bounded by bays, a massive heavy building floating above a dematerialized base, in imitation of a Japanese temple on steroids (if Japanese temples had parking garages beneath them).

At the end of the axis is a fairly restrained building, a rather flat evocation of a precast Renaissance palazzo, but with a badly-proportioned and under-detailed central archway that looks like a remodel carried out under the auspices of il Duce.

I thought this was the best of the lot – a strong, taut skin with a thoughtful rhythm of big punched openings, with the vestigial roof form articulated in steel and floating above the mass. (Note that this façade faces onto a depressed service road.)

But when you come around to the front side facing the pedestrian axis, they couldn’t restrain themselves, and just crapped it up with a clip-on arcade topped by a pergola, with the now-visible tiled roof looking silly floating above, vainly trying to disguise the daylighting monitors poking up behind.   It reminded me of a five-year-old who doesn’t know when to finish a drawing and keeps adding more and more until it is ruined.

It gets even worse with the addition of a squat octagonal pavilion (I bet they were thinking of the Florentine baptistery), tenuously connected to the rest of the building, with flat arches on the verandahs at the top, trying to make them look “special”.

The clip-on arcade is a just-the facts space, that looks like no one ever got around to designing it. It reminded me of similarly-scaled corridors in high-end shopping malls, and I expected a Nordstrom at the end of the axis.

Compare it to the arcade from the original complex, in which all the four surfaces have a simple yet contrasting character – the smooth floor, the rusticated wall, the dark beamed ceiling, and the arcade with its degree of texture varying from rusticated arches of smooth columns, all of this held together by the pattern of light and shadow.

The new arcade has none of this richness, and a closer look at the materials and detailing highlights their lame reference to the original. They did notice that the original had wooden beams holding up the ceiling, so they imitate this with a dark, linear metal snap-in ceiling. Rather than closely spaced joists which give a rhythm to the space, there is a very wide and shallow (probably fake) beam cover made of the same metal, occurring only at the columns, never establishing any kind of rhythm. The arcade wall itself is dreadful, with the arches jammed up against the ceiling, so that the top of the already-flat arch is just lopped off. It is obvious that the stonework is less than an inch thick, and the overly-elaborate joints articulation shows that it was considered only in elevation, as a two-dimensional surface pattern, rather than with any consideration of it as a three-dimensional, sculptural element, as seen in the original. I was taught that when you’re designing an arch (yes, they used to teach those things back in the 80s), always look at the proportions of the spandrels (the wall spaces between the arches), not just at the arches – advice which might have helped here.

When I looked at this central mall as a whole, it reminded me of Washington DC, another place where brilliant site planning is undermined by mediocre buildings designed to comply with an overly rigid and simplistic set of guidelines and standards. When the demands of the program probably require building out to the maximum volume allowed by the standards, you end up with buildings that are almost identical in height and footprint, and the architects must jump through hoops to differentiate their work within this restrictive shape and limited vocabulary. I think that in any large ensemble there should be a balance between the common order and the individuality of pieces, but at Stanford the parameters have killed any meaningful differentiation among the parts.

Away from the center of campus, things apparently can loosen up a bit, and there are some okay buildings. I really like the stark geometry of this building by Antoine Predock, which does treat the arches and punched openings as elemental slices through a seemingly thick wall. There is a strong, asymmetrical balance to the whole, with some pieces (such as the side elevation of the “arcade”) creating a local rhythm. It reminded me of how when classical architecture gets too fussy, eventually someone such as Ledoux comes along and reasserts the underlying geometric basis of the system. And the playing with the expression of the vault is very subtle, showing a complexity of spatial imagination that is just not apparent in the other buildings.

Some of the more recent buildings seem to acknowledge the new role Stanford plays in our culture, as the incubator for the tech geniuses who will move a few miles down the peninsula after graduation and join the Silicon Valley elite. This building by Forster and Partners looks like it might have been a rejected design option for the new Apple headquarters, so they just put it here to get the students acclimated to their anticipated milieu.

I’ve spoken with some people who are shocked by my opinion of the Stanford campus, as they see it as such a beautiful place, but after some discussion, they sometimes concede that the quality of the later buildings doesn’t match that of the original complex. I’d like to now compound my heresy by saying that I don’t think the original buildings are all that good either.   The places where the building forms reinforce the big axial moves of the campus plan are superb, creating dramatic vistas and long perspectives that emphasize the immensity and simplicity of the vision. The big arch framing this view is powerful, and the two pavilions enclosing the space while framing the further view are perfectly scaled and proportioned. It is scenography, done very well.

The gate pavilions on the cross axis assert their identity as objects beyond their functions of framing views. (Although the palm trees do give it a bit of a cheesy Hollywood studio / Mar-a-Lago ambience.)

But the main court itself is a bore. Walking in the arcade is extremely pleasing, yet viewed from the court, the arcade is just too relentless, an unvarying wall enclosing a very big space which has some random planting beds scattered around to relieve the monotony. Even where special events occur, such as the big church on axis, the arcade is barely inflected to acknowledge them, and the essential flatness of the enclosure wall continues. The space is really overscaled, and the architecture is too minimal and uniform to stand up to it.

Even the individual elements in the system do not help. This may be mainly my irrational taste, but after decades of considering these buildings, I’ve concluded that this is about the ugliest color of stone I’ve ever seen, a sort of sick-dog mustardy khaki. After months in the Southwest, where the variety of stone textures and colors was an endless source of surprise and delight, I can’t understand how you could find such an ugly stone, and then use so much of it.

The rustication is also overdone and boring. It looks like many bad 19th-century armories and other military facilities, which wanted to project that sense of martial strength. It gives a three-dimensionality of about one inch in depth to the material, which stands in contrast to the overwhelming flatness, planarity and lack of three-dimensional spatial exploration at the larger scale.

The comparison to Richardson to inevitable, and I can’t help wondering what this might have been like if he hadn’t died so young. These were clearly his followers, and they had learned the elements of the Richardsonian Romanesque, but they were only able to apply that vocabulary in a rote and perfunctory manner. There is one uniform system of parts and vocabulary, but that limited vocabulary is not being used to say anything very interesting. Compare this arcade corner, with its weak rounding-off and embarrassingly conventionally stylized decorative panel of wreaths and cartouche signs,

with Richardson’s mind-boggling stair at the New York State Capitol. The light and shadow are astounding, but more relevant here is the sense of three-dimensional play, the plasticity of the stone work, the recognition of stone as a material to be understood and shaped almost sculpturally, rather than a material that happens to be used to build an automatic and endlessly extruded space-enclosing system.

The argument might be that the arcade exists mainly as a system to enclose that court, and it should be a simpler, background element, as befits its role as just a wall. But look at the jail at the Allegheny County Courthouse, which has a literal wall running around it, and where Richardson somehow was able to play the continuity of the wall off the legibility of the individual pieces that interact with it.

The basic problem is that Shepley et al were not Richardson, which is not really their fault. (Were they the employees who were responsible for contact documents and administration? This may be one of the first cases where an architecture firm had enough institutional solidity to continue on as an enterprise, after its founding genius has died.)

Strangely, there is a big difference between their take on this Richardsonian approach, and what all the other Richardson imitators did. I once thought of writing a book called Not by Richardson, which was to be a catalogue of all the Romanesque buildings around the country which the locals always tell you are by Richardson, but aren’t. What most of those faux-Richardson buildings have in common is that they’re overly exuberant, with too many colors, textures, forms and details all jammed together, without the incredible restraint and balance that Richardson had. But at Stanford, we see the opposite – the elements of the Richardsonian vocabulary, used in a timid and limited manner. It’s robotic Richardson, with a primitive algorithm.

By far the best part of it are the smaller-scale elements. The pattern of simple openings making a sort of stone screen wall is beautiful. It’s a detail Richardson used often, and it is used here very well.

Or where the arcade becomes a pergola between two courts, and the landscape can be glimpsed though the arches. It reminds me of the little enclosed court at the rear of Trinity Church.

Or the narrow courts and passages formed by the elements of this system. They seem in scale with this intimate space, whereas the same architectural elements are overwhelmed by the scale of the main court. And just as the big moves in the architecture are best when they reinforce the big moves in the landscape, so the smaller scale architectural moves are best when they work with the small moves in the landscape. The architecture is just too boring to stand on its own. If the core of the campus had a clearer, systematic hierarchy of open spaces that drove the architectural design, it might have been more satisfying than what was built, where the landscape comes in two scales (very big and pretty small), while the architecture is always just at one scale.

It strikes me that the seed of the mediocrity of Stanford’s buildings was planted here, in the original core of the campus. The reliance upon architectural rules and uniformity was established, along with the subservience of individual pieces to the whole, and a distrust of any individual design expression or a big vision. We’ve learned that cities work better when there is contrast and juxtaposition among many buildings of different eras and styles. It is on a campus such as Stanford’s where we can see the effect of too much control and regularity, with the excessive integration leading to repetition and boredom.

How does one design a major university from scratch? The University of California system dealt with this question in the 1960s, as it expanded its number of campuses. The Santa Cruz campus is an interesting example, as it shows the influence of a few different strains of American campus design. The first American colleges were located in cities and towns, roughly following the urban European approach, but in America the campuses and towns usually grew simultaneously. In the 19th century, the model changed, partly reflecting the agrarian American distrust of the city, and benefitting from the land-grant system which provided support for state universities. The huge growth in universities after WWII reinforced this isolated campus approach, and most campuses reflected the same development pattern that was seen in suburbia – isolated buildings set in an open landscape, with much room set aside for cars. (This campus model was then adopted in the design of office, and even industrial “parks”.)  One aspect they all had in common was seeing the landscape as a fairly neutral, “natural” background for the buildings, and seldom designing the outdoor space as a bounded space; even the earlier campus planning strategies of quadrangles and malls were largely abandoned as being too formal.

The Santa Cruz campus reflects this trend – the site was a vast undeveloped area of forest and ranchland, up in the hills above Santa Cruz, but miles from the city center. The master plan reflects what was considered best practice planning then – separate clusters of development, linked by ring roads, with some accommodation for pedestrian movement among the clusters in the center. It was an overwhelmingly decentralized (or maybe multi-centralized) approach, one which responded to the anti-urban “environmentalism” of the day, and one which supposedly reflected the state government’s concerns about student revolts: student demonstrations would never be able to achieve a critical mass, as gatherings could be isolated in the different clusters by security forces. Dan Solomon has written about this development pattern (which he somewhat facetiously blames on Magic Markers) – he says that planners stopped drawing blocks and streets and just drew bubbles.

As we drove around the campus, this was indeed the feeling. We followed road signs and directions to the various clusters – it was impossible to intuitively grasp any spatial order, more like driving in the rural countryside than in a settled area. It reminded me of Columbia, Maryland, the new town built in the 1960s by the Rouse corporation, where you drive through the woods on curving roads, directed to the named residential clusters by signage, which are otherwise invisible in the woods as you pass. However, some of the pedestrian connections through the center of campus are quite amazing – you are often in a redwood forest, and ravines are bridged so that you are walking up in the tree canopy.

The campus does show the best side of cluster development, in its intention to preserve special natural open space by focussing higher densities in specific locations, rather than spreading density uniformly across the whole site.

Some of the buildings from the period are quite fine. This is the main library, designed by John Carl Warnecke and later remodeled by BOORA. A classic Brutalist institution set in the landscape, but with the simplicity and clarity that typified the best work of the era.

Jolie and Albert explained how as ideas on campus design have changed, recent projects have adapted. There is more of an academic center emerging, countering the initial scattering of buildings in the woods. It is also literally beginning to emerge, out of the woods and onto the meadow which has views over Santa Cruz out to Monterey Bay. This ecotone is magnificent, a spot in the landscape which captures what is unique in the spectacular California coastal landscape.

So I was perplexed by one of the more recent signature projects, a music complex by Antoine Predock. We had spent much of a day looking at some wonderful Predock buildings in Albuquerque, and he strikes me as one of the best regionalist modernist architects (similar to Erickson in the Northwest), able to integrate the universal imperatives of the modern movement with the peculiar qualities and demands of strong local context. The Predock buildings work beautifully in the desert, and I just couldn’t figure out how one had gotten to Santa Cruz. The open spaces were rather stark, preserving grand vistas, but not doing much for the humans huddled in the shade.

Rather than making a building in the landscape, Predock did one of his normal moves of making a building that is landscape, and you walk over and across and around the pieces. I glanced down into this oasis canyon. Was this his reference to Tsegi? Where were the horses?

Then looming ahead of us was the mesa. I know that concert halls want to be blank boxes, but I just couldn’t see how this had anything to do with this site. I think this points out the problem as the campus tries to move away from the models of the 60s – they recognize the need for a center, an actual build-up of density at the core of the campus, but they’re still stuck in the 60s paradigm of the building as object, not creating the important public spaces between buildings. This is especially surprising, as right on their own campus they have one of the best precedents around which could show them how to proceed.

While the Santa Cruz campus took the mid-century, decentralized-in-nature, American campus approach to a new extreme, it then also circled back to the older, English university system of residential colleges, which had been adapted in the early 20th century by some American universities, such as Harvard and Yale. The college broke down the overall scale of the large university to a smaller unit, which would have its own identity, reinforced by its own physical location. A student supposedly isn’t just an individual floating around in a huge, impersonal institution, but has an affiliation with an intermediate-sized entity, which allows them to become part of a identifiable community. Each of the residential pods at Santa Cruz becomes its own village, in this case set out in the wilderness, versus the dense urban locations of its predecessors.

Charles Moore was at the peak of his renown in 1970, having designed many brilliant buildings in California as part of MLTW, and having taught at most of the distinguished design schools in the country, including his stint as dean at Yale. The design for Kresge college works within the campus concepts of open landscape and residential colleges, but then he brought in yet another precedent from the past – treating the college as a small piece of dense urban fabric, rather than as a collection of individual buildings in the landscape. The other residential colleges, designed by other architects, do often try to establish a spatial identity to reinforce the institutional one, using a hierarchy of courtyards, irregular quadrangles and common open spaces, as well as a consistent formal vocabulary for the buildings. But overall, they do look much like other college dorm districts from the era.

Kresge College is totally different. From the exterior, it presents as a walled village – the buildings form an assemblage for the enclosure of the residents within. To enter, you must walk along the perimeter to one of the gates. Architecturally it also reinforces this idea of being a village or town, rather than one large building – the various forms are juxtaposed, and even collide – it intentionally avoids the uniformity that you expect when seeing one large complex deigned by a single architect, even though the vocabulary is consistent.

The boundaries and gates are emphasized, simply but powerfully. The wall plane is interrupted by a few large openings, through which you can glimpse the dense interior. Color plays an important role – on the exterior, there are often darker hues which allow the complex to recede into the forest. On the inside, white walls prevail, almost as in a Greek village. Though large trees have been preserved within the new townscape, it is clear that by crossing the threshold you have entered the domain of human settlement, protected from the dangers of the wild.

Your view is shaped by the frame of the gate and the tree, and you are presented with a forced perspective up the pedestrian street. As you proceed,

the view opens up, and you are greeted by an entry plaza. These two views set up the pattern for the rest of the complex – there are streets, and there are plazas – spaces through which you move bounded by linear buildings, and places where you are encouraged to gather. The architecture around the plazas is more imageable, with certain forms reading as iconic buildings, even as they maintain their role as part of the streetwall defining the plaza.

The architecture along the streets is more uniform, mainly rows of housing. Here again, there is a harkening back to older types – rather than the typical dorm type of rooms along corridors, there are suites and maisonette (rowhouse) units which are entered either off a porch zone, or from gallery circulation. The street becomes the hallway for the housing, and the buildings open to it, rather than being internally oriented. This also provides a pattern for the housing which is now sometimes seen in higher-density exurban housing – one side of the unit is oriented to the shared, public entry side, while the other faces out into the larger world. In this case, that larger world is the forest, which paradoxically, is quieter, darker and more private than the street side.

We were lucky to come across a large gathering on a Saturday afternoon, in this case, a university-wide gay pride event being held in one of the plazas. The containment within the space certainly contributed to the vitality of the festival, making it feel more intense than if it had been held in a large field somewhere else on campus. Jolie was interested to see this, as one of the current issues with the college is that the public spaces are not generally very lively (which I would guess is due to the students spending all their time indoors with the blinds drawn, surfing the internet).

The architecture is straightforward, yet expressive of its nature. The construction is simple and cheap – lightweight wood frame, covered with stucco, and accented with color. The repetitive, modular housing doesn’t try to be anything it isn’t (such as trying to manufacture a picturesque cuteness, or agglomerating the pieces into some grandiose statement), and the simple rhythm of the units established a sense of order along the streets.

At the end of the linear buildings, the section becomes the façade, and a little bit of playing with planes and colors makes a vivid elevation, where the inside- and outside-the-village vocabularies are integrated.

These regular types set the stage for the special effects, the iconic buildings where their special function is emphasized by non-typical designs. This is the view up the street, where the vista is terminated by the library. The forms are simple, the symmetry is not rigid, yet by the location, perspective, hierarchy of tumbling forms, use of color, solid and void, light and shadow, the library is established as an important, unique building, one which stands out from the background buildings. Moore has clearly been paying attention to the Rationalists such as Rossi and Krier, whose analysis of historical urban fabric emphasized this distinction between the private and the public in constituting the city. He also catches a certain moment in architectural history, where the forms of modernism are being inflected towards what became known as postmodernism. Without the self-conscious copying of historical forms, which postmodernism quickly devolved to, the lessons of history are being incorporated here, with the design of individual buildings supporting the overall urban design intent.

Inside, the building is defined by walls as relatively scale-less, abstract planes, crashing into each other to define spaces between, with relatively little structural expressiveness, but again with reference to iconic building elements, such as windows being cut into planes.

This building also emphasizes one of my favorite aspects of Moore’s design approach at this point. Lightweight wood frame is a remarkably flexible system. We tend to build in straight lines and repetitive dimensions with it, because that is simpler and cheaper, but we don’t have to. Here we can see Moore having fun within the parameters (not going to great lengths and expense to flout them) of the system, creating unexpected spaces and elements in an abstract spatial composition, which doesn’t mimic any historical or even conventional precedents. He is limited only by his spatial imagination, and the wood frame system gives him a wide degree of freedom.

Fifty years later, we find ourselves in a period where many architects feel the need for unrestricted and nontraditional spatial expression, but they achieve by very different means. Here is Gehry’s museum in Biloxi, which I think is achieving not dissimilar effects to Moore’s library (although on a grander scale):

Gehry’s building is made up of colliding brick and steel forms on the exterior, and seems to have an independently-framed interior of studs and gypsum board within that shell. This building probably cost ten times as much as Moore’s on a per square foot basis, and I’m not sure that the difference in cost is that noticeable in the final result. Many of today’s starchitects demand huge budgets to accomplish their visions (the late Zaha Hadid springs to mind), and much of that budget goes into cutting-edge technologires that let materials be twisted into forms that don’t come naturally to them. It is just very satisfying to see Charles Moore achieving his vision with some 2x6s and plywood sheathing.

Kresge College is almost fifty years old, and Jolie Kerns has the job of managing its renovation. It’s an interesting, yet daunting proposition, from many perspectives. An old woodframe building with stucco sheathing is definitely going to have issues with water and rot. The building was built under energy codes that are nothing like our current ones, and how could the envelope, including the windows, be brought up to code while maintaining any of the architectural character? College students now are pretty different form those in the 60s, much more used to more personal privacy, space and amenities, and more focussed on their online lives, rather than a collective existence in the analogue world. What are features of this college that can be preserved, and which will have to be adapted to modern life. The library also presents what might be the most difficult challenge: accessibility.

Here is a building whose whole premise is a series of levels and platforms and quirky little spaces. Can any of this character be preserved while making it accessible? If it can’t, it’s hard to see how in a strapped university system, spending the money to renovate it would be justifiable, or even legal. The university has hired Jeanne Gang’s office to come up with a master plan for the renovation of the college; Jolie was going off the next day to show her around the campus. I think that their approach will be a good fit; I recently saw her office’s proposal for a major remodel of the Baltimore aquarium, and it appeared to be a very good blending of new ideas and approaches (architectural, functional and environmental) with a recognition of the quality and importance of the existing buildings. I hope the same approach can work here. Kresge College is a really important and beautiful complex, and it illustrates a critical moment in our recent architectural history. It also has many lessons for our current world, as we still confront the problem of making humane places which draw from our traditions, within a largely placeless and soulless modern context.

Dwelling – home – place: the cliff dwellings of the ancient Southwestern peoples strongly evoke these associations in most contemporary observers. How is it that the ruins of a civilization from 700 years ago resonate so intensely with us now, when our lives and our world in no way resemble theirs? The initial hook for me at Chaco was the plan – how the architectural order visible in that plan was riveting. But cliff dwellings appeal to normal people – not just architects – and this appeal comes from the image, not from the plan.

The first cliff dwelling I ever saw was Montezuma’s Castle (about an hour north of Phoenix), twenty years ago. It is the picture-perfect cliff dwelling, the small enclave for a few families, tucked into a small arch in a canyon wall. Different buildings have differently-colored masonry, so it is easy to imagine them as individual houses, rather than one large complex. Montezuma’s Castle is the dollhouse version of a cliff dwelling, the one a small child might draw.

The cliff dwelling itself is intriguing, and the surrounding environment is gorgeous. You are traveling in the high fringes of the Sonoran Desert, and you then descend into a narrow canyon of the Green River. The desert is replaced by an oasis – a lush riverbottom of grasslands and shrubs, with cottonwoods lining the river.

It is cool and green, sheltered from the sun and wind – it feels like a tended garden more than a natural environment. I think this is much of the appeal of cliff dwellings – humans belong here. While we may appreciate the stark beauty of the desert – mainly because we know we can escape it back to our civilized comforts at a moment’s notice – we know at a visceral level that it is not a place for us, that we couldn’t last a day there unsheltered. The desert inspires awe, a word which in its original usage was understood to include a dose of terror. The canyon evokes a sense of relief, shelter from the heat, a “place” in the trackless wastes of the desert, where humans can abide.

It is physical shelter due to the change in microclimate, but also psychic shelter due to the sense of enclosure. The horizon out on the desert can be a hundred miles away – here the canyon is just a few hundred yards wide, putting a boundary around the inhabitation that sets it off from the infinite spaces above.

You can also see the harmony between the natural world and the built world. The cliff dwelling is the accent which marks our fitting into this environment. JB Jackson defined landscape as the sum of the natural environment plus the built environment, and nowhere is this more archetypally visible than here. Humans haven’t dominated the place – they have recognized the qualities of the natural world which will nurture them, and have built a small dwelling which enhances their viability functionally. It has been done so perfectly that it is apparent to all on a deeply intuitive level. Tourists stand quietly, marveling at the ruins above them.

We returned there one winter when Greta was three years old, and she was fascinated by it, wandering along the river path and gazing up at the ruin. This year, as we approached Montezuma’s Castle again, I asked Greta whether she remembered it. She said she did, vaguely. But as we entered the canyon, specific spots triggered strong memories for her. The path paralleling the river by the cottonwoods, the opening in the woods approaching the cliff, the view of the houses themselves – they all came back to her as they appeared. This place had been so different from anything she’d seen in her short life that these vivid impressions had been filed away, ready to emerge when seen again. A little, primal human responding to the primal, archetypal elements

At Navajo National Monument we saw the remains of Betatakin from across the canyon. We weren’t allowed to enter the canyon, but even looking at it from above, the importance of the canyon microclimate was apparent.

As usual, the Park Service had an excellent sign explaining this – showing how the climate zones in a canyon were inverted from those seen on a mountainside, with the cooler weather, alpine vegetation at the bottom.

The village itself was tiny, tucked beneath the large arch across the canyon, exposed to the warming spring sun.

I started to wonder why we call these places cliff dwellings – canyon dwellings might be more accurate. They were never located on mountain cliffs looking across the desert, always in canyon walls.

The cliff-dwelling civilization followed the era that was centered at Chaco Canyon. A variety of reasons have been proposed for the change – the climate becoming more severe, with persistent drought requiring dispersal to locations with more reliable water supplies; attacks from other tribes leading to building more defensible villages; a breakdown in the social order, etc. No one knows the main reason, and some archaeologists think it is most likely a combination of many of these reasons.

The primacy of the canyon location became even more clear at Tsegi (Canyon de Chelly), where the Antelope House is located at the foot of a cliff, but on the canyon floor, not in a recess. We wondered about its risk of being flooded, but if the buildings have been there for hundreds of years, they must have called that one right.

Just as no one has the definitive reason as to why people left Chaco-era settlements, no one knows exactly why these villages were built in canyon cliffs. They have many advantages – shelter from the high summer sun while being exposed to the warming winter sun, easily defensible from attackers, always located with a good water source, where groundwater seeped out from cracks in the cliffs, overlooking a canyon bottom where crops could be grown, or slightly below the canyon rim, giving access to farmland above. Again, probably a combination of these reasons.

Access was Important – often from below as here at Mummy Cave at Tsegi. The “tower” form is apparent, although it is not known whether the tower function was critical, or whether it was just a vertical stack of rooms.

White Cliff House at Tsegi shows both ways the village on the canyon floor could be built – either in a arch above, or directly on the floor. There are a lot of these bottom-access villages at Tsegi – perhaps that meant that the canyon as a whole was defensible, and they didn’t have to rely on the inaccessibility of individual clusters.

(Tsegi was one of the most extraordinary places we visited – for many reasons beyond the cliff dwellings – so I will put up a post just about it.)

There are no cliff dwellings at the Grand Canyon – perhaps because it was just too big and deep to furnish the necessary microclimate that came with a smaller canyon. But there were ancient people there, dwelling in pit houses near the top of the rim. The Tusayan Museum has artifacts from this era thousands of years ago, including fetish animals made from reeds and willow twigs. They were simple and powerful, and again we northwesterners were astonished to see unrotted plant material that old.

We finally arrived at Mesa Verde, which was the center of the post-Chaco civilization. I knew some vague things about Mesa Verde before visiting, but I was unprepared for its extent. Within the Park boundaries, there are 4500 archaeological sites – cliff dwellings, pit-house villages, farms, and great houses which resemble those left behind at Chaco. It is only 100 miles from Chaco, but it is located in a very different environment, a series of branching canyons on a ridge of the Rocky Mountains, versus the desert plain at Chaco.

The most-visited ruin is Spruce Tree House, misnamed after the large trees which grew in front of and sheltered it, which were actually Douglas Firs (obvious to northwesterners). The pit house settlements at Mesa Verde were on the canyon rim, and the cliff villages are right below the rim, and accessed from above. Normally one can hike through this village, but a large piece of stone detached from the arch a little while ago, and so we couldn’t go in.

The Square Tower House.

The nearby Cliff Place is the largest of the villages. You can see the pattern of plazas and paths, square rooms (probably private or used for storage, as at Chaco), and the round rooms, which are now thought to be shared, living and working rooms, rather than just used as ceremonial kivas. There are square and round towers.

The most surprising experience was coming to this viewpoint and realizing how many cliff dwellings could be seen from one point – I have put yellow circles below the clusters, both above and below the rim.

This area comprises the Fire House and New Fire House to the left, with several other village in sight on the far canyon wall. Some of these are accessed from the rim, but the ones to the left also connect to the canyon floor, where it climbs higher.

Montezuma’s Castle is a relatively isolated village – certainly in communication with other villages, but alone in its own canyon. Mesa Verde is clearly an organized metropolitan area, with a system of villages and dwellings located at appropriate sites, all within close proximity. The Sun Temple is marked by the yellow dot just below the rim – it is a Chaco-style great house, and probably served as the center for all the villages in the area.

I began to wonder if the transition from Chaco to Mesa Verde might reflect some of the same processes that were seen in Europe in the Dark Ages. Did the environmental, social and political forces at the time make large, centralized settlements unsustainable, and so a smaller, decentralized village-based system sprang up? Or, closer to home, as some archaeologists have speculated that Chaco was the ancient version of Las Vegas, I wondered if Mesa Verde represents ancient sprawl?

The most amazing thing at Mesa Verde is the chance to actually climb through a cliff dwelling. Unfortunately, three of the accessible villages only open after Memorial Day, but we were able to visit the Balcony House. We were part of a large group of tourists led by a ranger. When you buy your tickets, they are very explicit about the obstacles that you will encounter – after walking down metal stairs attached to the canyon wall for five stories, you hike along a path and approach a 32-foot tall ladder up to the village (marked in yellow on the right side of the photo below). When exiting the village, you have to climb through a 12-foot long tunnel/chamber, which at its tightest point is 18 inches wide and 27 inches high. Then you climb another ladder, up to footholds cut into the cliff, with a chain to hold onto and a steel fence to keep you from falling to your death (marked in yellow on the left side of the photo below). Given my claustrophobia and Greta’s fear of heights we carefully considered it, and decided we just couldn’t pass it up. When we joined out group, we thought that if we were worried, these people should have thought about it a lot more -there were quite a few typical American tourists, overweight and out of shape and very casually dressed (rock climbing in sandals?), and we wondered if some of them would actually be able to fit through the tunnel.

This is the first ladder, leading to the village:

We got past that fine, surrounded by people who were determinedly not looking down. Next was the narrow, defensible entryway.

Which led to the first of two plazas – surrounded by buildings under the overhang on three sides, and open to the canyon to the east.

It was incredible to be standing there, knowing that 1000 years ago the residents had been right there, going about their business of grinding meal, cleaning animal carcasses, living normal lives. In the second courtyard, there is a large beam cantilevered out from a building – it is thought that this was used for hanging carcasses to dry, away from vermin (and res dogs).

The group is standing beside one of the round rooms in the plaza – entered from above, probably better heated due to its shape and location, and perhaps used for daily activities.

The view from the second plaza – across Soda Canyon. We don’t know if the Ancestral Puebloans appreciated views, but the modern Americans certainly did. Beyond the beauty, this picture points out another of the reasons we find cliff dwellings so meaningful – refuge and prospect. These factors probably come from a time in our evolution when they were critical to our survival – the knowledge that you were in a safe, protected spot, and able to see things coming from a ways off – either things you might eat, or things that might attack you. We may not have quite the same primal requirement for these conditions, but modern humans tend to really like places with these qualities. We wondered whether the Park Service might initiate some Air Bnb opportunities in their cliff dwellings.

The way out: it wasn’t a tunnel so much as a small chamber, with narrow deep doorways at each end. Here is 100-pound Greta squeezing through, and when I followed her I had to twist my torso to fit my shoulders through. We had made sure we were near the front of the line, as I had no desire to be in the middle when some large people got stuck ahead and behind me. Everyone made it through, but it was quite a while before some of them emerged.

This is looking down at the final ladder and the hewn footholds in the cliff. This was the most terrifying part for many people, and the camaraderie exhibited, as people in distress were exhorted and cheered on, was very commendable. We didn’t leave anyone behind.

The Southwest had many highlights for us – the landscapes and National Parks, the ancient ruins, some of the towns, the pueblos – and one of the best parts has been acquiring a rudimentary understanding on how all of this fits together. It is wholly different from where we have ever lived – climatically, culturally, historically – and by seeing these cliff dwellings within their environmental and historical context, it all started to make sense. 20 years ago I had visited the Hopi reservation, seeing villages that were, unimaginably, 700 years old. But now, seeing how humans have lived here through different eras even further in the past, the more recent settlements and cultures make more sense. There is an astounding, unbroken chain of people moving from somewhere else to construct the Chaco culture, then on to the cliff dwelling era, and then on to the pueblos, which remain into our time.

The compulsion to visit a place:  what triggers it?  Travel is often arduous, time-consuming and expensive, yet we feel ourselves irresistibly drawn to certain places, no matter the difficulties.  For many, it’s an image of the place: sunlight glinting on the peaks of the Himalayas, the clear blue water of the Caribbean, or the Vermeer painting (that you need to see larger than a postcard).  For others, it’s the map – that intriguing road over the ridge and down into the plain with the city in the distance.  Or perhaps the food:  you’ve had a taste of a cuisine, but know you’ll never understand it until you head to the source.  Or a movie: set in Paris is the 30s, or New York in the 40s.  It could be the history – Jesus lived there, or Napoleon, or your ancestors.  The music – where the legacy of Mozart or Louis Armstrong continues.  A cultural event:  running with the bulls, or Mardi Gras.  Or the stories – the England of Austen or the San Francisco of Hammett.

For architects, sometimes it is the plan.  it may seem strange to others, but the beauty and the order of a place is sometimes revealed in a plan, in a way that is different from a view.  A view shows you only a glimpse from one point, in one direction;  a plan shows the underlying logic and design of the whole.  Architects spend years of their lives studying plans, and we get pretty good at understanding the spatial reality of a building from looking at a two-dimensional plan view, something that you will never really see, even if you visit the place.   We can fall in love with the concept for the place through the plan, and then need to go there, to see how the experience grows out of that concept.

There are plans that everyone recognizes.  Versailles.  St.Peter’s.  The Darwin D. Martin House.  Chartres.  Then we all develop our personal obsessions;  I had the plans of Jørn Utzon’s Fredensborg and Kingo housing project hanging on my walls for a decade before getting to see them in person.  We had already hit a few plan-obsession destinations on this trip – mainly the Kahn buildings – but there was one more critical site waiting on the Colorado Plateau:  Chaco Canyon.

The plan to which I’m referring is the floor plan of Pueblo Bonito, the largest of the great houses at Chaco.  Before I knew anything about the the history of this place, I found this plan completely fascinating.  There’s the repetition of the small quadrilateral rooms which form a field for everything else, the irregular perimeter, the two almost symmetrical plazas, and the irregular distribution of round rooms.  The non-geometric qualities of this plan might have driven earlier architects nuts, but there’s a way in which the balance between order and random, regularity and exception, figure and ground, resonates with the way we see the world in the 21st-century.

If Chaco were not so compelling, we might not have bothered to go.  It is in the middle of nowhere – 400 miles from Phoenix, 200 from Albuquerque.  It’s 100 miles from Gallup, which is already in the middle of nowhere.  And then there’s the road in – 20 miles of the worst dirt road I’ve ever seen, much of of it washboard, on which we had to drive about 3 mph.  We had just heard from someone we met at Canyon de Chelly that when she drove in the week before, much of it was mud where the road crossed flash flood zones, and people had abandoned their trailers in the middle of the road.  We were lucky it was dry when we arrived, but it still did some damage to our trailer – loosened every screw, broke the door off the refrigerator, and caused what is referred to in our family as the Nutella Incident.

The recompense for all this effort was getting to a place that is only visited by people who are engaged enough to make the trip.  There were no monster Rvs in sight, no services or food available – a pristine place where the quiet and darkness of the night sky were amazing.  It must be the only national park which has prehistoric stone houses right in the campground. 

There is a lot of confusion in the general culture about the inhabitants and history of Chaco Canyon, or as it is technically now known, Chaco Culture National Historical Park.  The name emphasizes a critical aspect if its history:  Chaco was not one settlement area, it was the center for a culture that spread hundreds of miles out across the ancient Southwest.  This culture peaked in the era from the 800s to the 1100s, at which point Chaco went into decline, and other areas became more prominent.  The ruins at Chaco are the oldest and most important remnants of this ancient civilization, our Machu Picchu or Chichen Itza.

The canyon itself is rather wide and only a couple of hundred feet deep.  As a geographical feature, it is not as notable as such spectacular canyons as Zion or Canyon de Chelly, and it doesn’t seem to possess as many natural features that would single it out as being a great location for concentrated human settlement as they do.  We’re not sure what it meant in the culture a thousand years ago – there is no written record.  But the archaeological evidence at Chaco is clear that it was the center – hundreds of thousands of artifacts were found (most of which are now stored at museums in New York, Washington, etc.) that show the power and wealth concentrated here – cloaks made from the feathers of parrots, sea shells from the Pacific, human remains interred on beds of thousands of pieces of turquoise, rooms where exotic birds from Central America were raised.

What can be seen at Chaco now are the ruins of over a dozen “great houses” and smaller buildings.  The largest is Pueblo Bonito, which had over 600 rooms on four levels.   The function of great houses is not completely clear.  They could have been the residences of the most important people – not many people actually lived in them relative to their size;  they weren’t apartment houses. Each one might have been associated with a certain clan.   They might have been religious cultural or commercial buildings.  One of the theories about Chaco is that it was the ancient version of Las Vegas – the big city in the desert, to which people from other places travelled to congregate, have fun and spend money.

What is know in amazing detail is the physical history.  To someone who lives in the Northwest, the strangest thing about the desert is that wood doesn’t rot.  The beams in these ruins are original, and they are mostly over 1000 years old.  

The science of dendrochronology has now compiled such a complete database of the past millennia that the precise dating of any piece of wood is possible by looking at the sequence of growth rings.  They can tell to the year when a tree was cut down.  They also know where these trees came from, and it wasn’t from around Chaco – hundreds of thousands of trees were cut down in the mountains over fifty miles away and carried to Chaco (they didn’t have horses).  

While most of the ancient floor and roof construction has been destroyed over the past thousand years, some has not.  The ceiling construction in the this room is original.  

The masonry has been dated with precision too, with five different techniques identified, corresponding to different eras.  Here at the Chetro Ketl great house you can see how the openings in a colonnade from one era were filled in later with a different technique.  

Greta and I are both skeptical about overly-definite conclusions about the past drawn from scant archaeological findings;  David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries is one of our touchstones.    So we were pleased to find that recent archaeology has become more careful about this.  The best example is how the understanding of the prominent round rooms in Southwestern architecture has evolved.  They are commonly called kivas, as that is the Hopi name for their own round, ceremonial rooms, which are obviously descended from earlier rooms in places such as Chaco.   But that association of form with use was inappropriately applied to prehistoric structures – we don’t really know that all these rooms were ceremonial.  So now they are generally called “round rooms”, and while some, such as the one shown here at Chetro Ketl might be considered ceremonial due to their size and location, smaller ones embedded in the fabric of the building might have functioned simply as gathering rooms, or easily-heated rooms where people would congregate.  (I tend towards the theory is that it may have had a lot to do with the difficulties in roofing larger rectangular rooms in wood.)  

The largest round room is Casa Rinconada, essentially a big room with a few surrounding support spaces.  

Visitors are given great freedom to wander around the buildings in Chaco – entry is not allowed to various buildings or sequences of rooms, but there are many spaces which are completely open. We took a few excellent guided tours, and then returned to the same houses on our own, to spend time in and photograph the parts that most interested us.  

Beyond the ruins, the experience of camping at Chaco is worth the trip alone.  It is astoundingly isolated and quiet, and the few other people around were remarkably inconspicuous.  Our campground was one of the most primitive and beautiful of our trip,

and it was extraordinary to sit there in the evening, looking across the canyon to Fajada Butte (seemingly a very important ritual site, based upon evidence of building and astronomical alignments), realizing that we were seeing essentially the same landscape as the original residents 1000 years before, sitting outside their house fifty yards away.  

Chaco is where we began to understand the complicated. but not so mysterious, fate of this civilization.  We used to call these people the Anasazi, but that term fell out of favor a while back, as it was a Navajo word, meaning roughly, alien ancestors.  As the Navajo got here fairly recently, why should their word be used?  It is now well-known that the People Formerly Know as Anasazi are in fact the ancestors of the Hopi, Zuni, and other modern Puebloan tribes.  We can’t use the word Hisatsinom, which is the preferred Hopi term, as there are other distinct language groups among the descendants, and no one word bridges these languages.  So Ancestral Puebloan is indeed the most accurate and respectful way to name them.

The mystery of why they left Chaco is still there, but there are many clues.  A drought probably contributed, and as this location became less viable, the centers of this civilization moved on to the later cliff dwellings, which had environmental as well as defensive advantages.  At a certain point, those cliff dwellings were abandoned too, and the modern Puebloan villages, such as the Hopi village of Walpi on First Mesa, were founded about 800 years ago.  When the Hopi have been asked to explain what happened in the past, they generally say, you know, it was just time to move on.

How did my fascination with the plan play out?  We learned that we could hike up the canyon wall to see Pueblo Alto, a great house located on the canyon rim.  From that trail, we would be able to look down upon Pueblo Bonito.  We started up what is actually one of the ancient pathways into the canyon, with narrow passages and stairs, some of them hewn out of the rock by the residents.  There was a view of Kin Kletso:

and then the path narrowed considerably, to a slot in the cliff, one which could easily be guarded against enemies.  

Shortly beyond where this photo was taken, Greta yelled “Snake!” and jumped back.  We watched the snake for a while, which was not moving very much, weaving back and forth at the narrowest part of the passage.  

After watching it for a few minutes, we couldn’t tell what species it was, and Greta, our family naturalist, noted that there were indeed poisonous snakes in the region that were not rattlesnakes.  (We showed this photo to a ranger the next day, who said it was probably a bull snake, not moving much because it was still cold.)  I halfheartedly ventured that we might chimney-climb above the snake, supporting ourselves on the rock faces above, but Greta was having none of it, so we turned back.

We took this as an omen.  Apparently many Hopi do not like to visit Chaco, feeling that there are   good reasons that their ancestors left, and that there is some bad juju there.  We felt that if you are venturing on an ancient path, made narrow and defensible by its builders to protect the settlement below, and if at the narrowest point a strangely-behaving snake plants itself in your way, you should pay attention.

I didn’t get the plan-view from above of Pueblo Bonito, so I don’t know if it would have caused a personal architectural epiphany.  Maybe I wasn’t ready to have it, so the guardian snake intervened.  But as I had been wandering around Chaco, the importance of the plan receded in my mind.  I have found that preconceptions about places often turn out to be inaccurate, or at least misleading, when the place is actually visited.  The experience of moving through a complex, three-dimensional place encompasses so much more information than can ever be adequately represented in two dimensions that this is necessarily so.  My earliest fascination with Chaco was with the pattern of the plan, and now I can add to that the very different experience of moving through those spaces that were inhabited one thousand years ago.  I went to Chaco with a limited understanding of  the underlying, abstract complexity of the physical structure; I left with a much deeper (but still rudimentary) understanding of the complexity of the history and culture that had produced the place.  Perhaps I can return when I have a better understanding of how that process of production happened.