Painted Desert Community Complex Historic District

The Painted Desert Community Complex is the administrative center of Petrified Forest National Park. The community center includes administrative facilities, utility structures and National Park Service employee housing, planned by architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander as part of the Mission 66 park facilities improvement program. Work on the community began in 1961 and was completed by 1965. The complex contrasts with earlier Park Service architecture that sought to blend with the environment. The Painted Desert community used straight manufactured materials that deliberately draw a contrast with the natural environment.

The most significant building is the Painted Desert Visitor Center, designed as a severely modernist structure that includes administrative offices., a visitor center, an auditorium, a clinic and staff apartments. Other structures include a community center, school and a Fred Harvey Company concession building.

Neutra and Alexander paid particular attention to the division of the complex into public and private areas, using low walls to divide the Park Service service area from the central zone, and setting the inward-facing residential areas at a distance. Pedestrian circulation paths are used as defining organizing elements.

The original landscape design used non-native plants that required regular watering. Removal of irrigation caused these plants to die, altering the landscape.

Famous quotes containing the words painted, desert, community, complex, historic and/or district:

    To Him, the painted swallow,
    to Him, the lump of amber,
    to Him, the boy and girl
    with roses and love-knots,
    to Him, the little cat
    to play beneath the Manger....
    Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

    There is a silence where hath been no sound,
    There is a silence where no sound may be,
    In the cold grave—under the deep, deep sea,
    Or in wide desert where no life is found,
    Thomas Hood (1799–1845)

    ... no community where more than one-half of the adults are disfranchised and otherwise incapacitated by law and custom, can be free from great vices. Purity is inconsistent with slavery.
    Tennessee Claflin (1846–1923)

    All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.
    Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)

    The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
    Rebecca West (1892–1983)