Mary Colter, architect and decorator. . - Books About Antiques - Mary Colter, Architect of the Southwest - book review

Magazine Antiques, April, 2002 by Alfred Mayor

To build the Watchtower on the edge of the Grand Canyon, she took six months off, commandeered a Harveycar, and toured the Indian watchtowers at Mesa Verde, a number of sites in Arizona, and at Hovenweep in Utah. At the Grand Canyon site she had a seventy-foot-tall wooden platform built so as to evaluate the impact of the projected tower on the landscape. The stone came from nearby canyons or ancient Indian ruins. What appears to be random stonework was plotted with precision. She even introduced cracks into the masonry, and Tshaped doors, partly filled with rubble to appear "as if done in haste in the fear of the attack of an enemy" The author comments: "Like most of her works, the Watchtower is a stage set and Colter a master of special effects. To show how the ancient tower builders would often appropriate the site and materials of prior structures, Colter planted a 'ruin' directly next to the tower, an unfinished roofless set of stone walls that looks as if it had been plundered to build the Watchtower." The Watchtower is stabilized by a modem steel frame, unseen from the outside and from the exotic interior. Visitors enter the replica of a kiva, with ceiling timbers salvaged from the log-framed Grandview Hotel built in the 1 1890s, and ascend into a balcony-ringed column of space three stories high, decorated everywhere with murals of Indian legends, painted by Indians, and punctuated by windows giving onto the view.

One of Colter's later assignments was to design the table china for the Santa Fe's Super Chief train. For this she took motifs painted during the thirteenth century by the Mimbreno Indians of southewestern New Mexico. And for those motifs she went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City--or rather to a warehouse in Brooklyn full of Mimbres pottery A friend described it as "a day's taxi-fare, a long search for the man with the key hours of copying in a huge loft undisturbed for years, and these vivid and humorous running quail, inquisitive rabbits, and tender fawns were brought out for the joy of modem travelers." True to form, Colter rejected the first samples made of the china: the black was too black and the lines too perfect to have been painted with a chewed twig, as the Mimbres did. The Santa Fe continued to use this china until it ended passenger service in 1971.

In Colter's time architecture was a male preserve. She proclaimed herself an architect and decorator, but by-and-large only the second title was acknowledged. This detailed consideration of her work, excellently illustrated, begins to redress the balance for this Prospero of the Southwest. For those in a hurry, chapter one is an admirable summation of a full and complex life.

Mary Colter, Architect of the Southwest, by Arnold Berke (Princeton Architectural Press, 800-288-2129), $35.00 (hardcovers).