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09 · American Vernacular & Regional

Rustic (Parkitecture)

c. 1900–1940

National park rustic: whole-log columns, boulder chimneys, and great lodge halls that look grown from the landscape.

Look for

Log construction Prominent chimney Exposed rafter tails
Old Faithful Inn, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming: an example of Rustic (Parkitecture) architecture
Old Faithful Inn, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Photo: Jim Peaco, Public domain
The Ahwahnee, Yosemite National Park, California
The Ahwahnee Yosemite National Park, California · Mark James Miller, CC BY-SA 3.0
El Tovar Hotel, Grand Canyon, Arizona
El Tovar Hotel Grand Canyon, Arizona · Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), CC BY-SA 4.0
Many Glacier Hotel, Glacier National Park, Montana
Many Glacier Hotel Glacier National Park, Montana · Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Timberline Lodge, Mount Hood, Oregon
Timberline Lodge Mount Hood, Oregon · edward stojakovic from chicago, United States, CC BY 2.0

what it is

National Park Service rustic, informally called parkitecture, is a style of building designed to blend into the natural settings of American parks. Builders used materials from the site or region: whole logs, boulders and fieldstone for foundations and chimneys, and wood shingles for roofs and walls. Walls are often stone at the base with log or timber above, and roofs have wide eaves. Work was done largely by hand, avoiding strict symmetry. Large lodges have lobbies open to the roof framing, surrounded by log balconies and anchored by stone fireplaces.

The Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone (1904) has a log lobby rising 92 feet to the roof and a stone fireplace 16 feet square at its base. Glacier Park Lodge in Montana (1913) has Douglas-fir lobby columns 40 feet tall. The Ahwahnee in Yosemite (1927) uses granite and concrete poured into molds and stained to look like wood, chosen for fire resistance. Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, Oregon, was built by the Works Progress Administration and dedicated in 1937.

how to spot one

Log construction Walls of whole logs stacked horizontally, with notches cut near the ends so the logs interlock at the corners. It is traditional in Scandinavia, Russia and North American frontier cabins. Prominent chimney A large chimney built on an exterior wall, often of patterned brick or grouped into clusters of stacks (shafts above the roof). It is common on Tudor Revival and Queen Anne houses. Exposed rafter tails The ends of the rafters, the sloping beams that support a roof, left visible under the roof edge instead of being boxed in. They are common on Craftsman bungalows of the early 1900s.

Also look for

Steep gableKnee braceShingle siding

history

The style drew on the Adirondack camps of the 1870s and the Arts and Crafts movement. Railroads built the first large rustic park hotels. Robert Reamer designed the Old Faithful Inn, built over the winter of 1903-1904 from lodgepole pine and local rhyolite stone, for the Yellowstone concessioner. Charles Whittlesey, chief architect of the Santa Fe Railway, designed El Tovar at the Grand Canyon, which opened in 1905, and the Great Northern Railway opened Glacier Park Lodge in 1913.

In the 1920s, landscape architect Thomas Chalmers Vint and architect Herbert Maier made rustic design standard National Park Service practice. Maier's Yosemite Museum (1925) and four trailside museums in Yellowstone (1928-1931) are examples. In the 1930s, Civilian Conservation Corps crews built rustic cabins, shelters and lodges in national and state parks, using pattern books influenced by Maier, and the Works Progress Administration built Timberline Lodge, dedicated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937. After World War II, the Park Service's Mission 66 program replaced the style with simpler modern buildings to serve growing numbers of visitors arriving by car.

where to find it

The great park lodges: Old Faithful Inn, Yosemite's Ahwahnee, Glacier's lodges, and Grand Canyon's El Tovar, plus CCC-era structures in state parks everywhere.

easy to confuse with

Gamble House, an example of Craftsman / Bungalow Craftsman / Bungalow Low, broad bungalows with deep porches on thick tapered piers, visible rafter ends, and angled roof braces. Ballenberg Open-Air Museum, an example of Alpine Vernacular Alpine Vernacular Chalets: wide low-pitched roofs with huge overhangs, stacked timber walls, and carved balconies.