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From West to Southwest

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1869 to Irish immigrant parents, Colter lived as a child in St. Paul, Minnesota, then in Texas, in Colorado, and then back in St. Paul where her family moved in 1880 when she was 11 years old.

After graduating from public high school in 1883 at the age of 14, in 1887 Colter moved to Oakland, California, and enrolled in the California School of Design in San Francisco, where Bernard Maybeck was sometimes among the teachers.

After graduation from design school, Colter returned to St. Paul and taught drawing and drafting and architectural design for several years. In 1902, she was hired by the Harvey Company, highly-regarded and exclusive purveyors of accommodations along the Santa Fe rail line in the West, for an interior design project.

Then in 1905 the Harvey Company hired her again to design her first building, the Hopi House at the Grand Canyon village on the south rim, facing the entrance of their new El Tovar Hotel by Charles Whittlesey. Intensively engaged in developing the Grand Canyon as a destination for sophisticated rail travelers in coordination with their other southwestern facilities, the Harvey Company would be Colter's primary employer for the rest of her professional life.

Along with real design talent, hard work, and strong attention to detail, extensive research, even to the point of periodic cultural immersion, was key to Mary Jane Colter's successful interpretation of southwestern vernaculars. Describing Colter in a 1950 book on Native American life, Frank Waters wrote, "For years an incomprehensible woman in pants, she rode horseback through the Four Corners making sketches of prehistoric pueblo ruins, studying details of construction, the composition of adobes and washes. She could teach masons how to lay adobe bricks, plasterers how to mix washes, carpenters how to fix viga joints."

Watchtower at Desert View

Arnold Drake begins his substantial book "Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest," with this description of the Watchtower:

"Sunrise at Desert View illumines a boundless landscape as well as a curious round tower that pushes up boldly from its midst. Even as the canyon far below remains blue-brown and murky, its rippled layers and sharp peaks advancing sluggishly into the light, the sun rising from behind the mesa called Cedar Mountain models, warms, and tinges the rocky tower. Its oddly coursed bands of wide and narrow stone take on texture, and, high above the the trees, the topmost windows start to shine in the sun. The monolith has become the dawning panorama's brightest feature. It is of earth, not sky, yet it is the first star of morning."

Experienced Oeuvre

Colter's significant oeuvre may have been so broadly overlooked in part because of the intense focus of mainstream art history on the highly-simplified narrative of sequential movements, from which she stood somewhat aside. In addition, architects whose work is located in regional hinterlands tend to be less-recognized, as do designers who work as employees rather than in their own firms, and as do women.

Still, Colter's work was well in tune with the sweeping shift of architectural design around the Western world, away from a centuries-long narrow absorption with a handful of historically-derivative European styles. Her demonstrative and romantic forms strike similarities with the romantic neo-vernacular of Scandinavia, and are very much in sync with the contemporary shedding of applied Greco-Roman or Gothic ornament long-recognized in the Early Modern of Western art history.

Her work also bears similarity to designs by Frank Lloyd Wright over the same period, though Colter seems to delve deeper into the regional vernacular for her detail language and references, while Wright strove more to create a personally-defined language of architectural detail.

Rooted strongly in Southwestern culture, and practicing there primarily (though in the relative obscurity that existed before the age of the U.S. interstate highway system), Mary Jane Colter drew on a rich local vernacular with subtlety and sophistication, both cultural and climatic, to create lasting architectural drama.   >>>

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SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE Lookout Studio, by Mary Colter, 1914, in Grand Canyon Village on the South RIm of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Photo: Kevin Matthews/ ArtificeImages The Watchtower, by Mary Colter, seen in a view approaching from the south. Photo: Kevin Matthews/ ArtificeImages Overview of the Watchtower, looking north. Photo: Kevin Matthews/ ArtificeImages South side details on the Watchtower include a primordially rusticated base. Photo: Kevin Matthews/ ArtificeImages Intricate layering of the apparent modifications of long usage help create a sense of ancientness at the Watchtower. Photo: Kevin Matthews/ ArtificeImages Looking westward at the round gift shop room of the Watchtower. Photo: Kevin Matthews/ ArtificeImages A buttress on the north side of the Watchtower, with integral chimney, seems to grow up from the mother rock of the Grand Canyon. Photo: Kevin Matthews/ ArtificeImages Ravens perch in the crown of the Watchtower, by Mary Colter. Photo: Kevin Matthews/ ArtificeImages   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.