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.
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“Come gather round me players all:
Come praise Nineteen-Sixteen,
Those from the pit and gallery
Or from the painted scene
That fought in the Post Office
Or round the City Hall....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“What though the traveler tell us of the ruins of Egypt, are we so sick or idle that we must sacrifice our America and today to some man’s ill-remembered and indolent story? Carnac and Luxor are but names, or if their skeletons remain, still more desert sand and at length a wave of the Mediterranean Sea are needed to wash away the filth that attaches to their grandeur. Carnac! Carnac! here is Carnac for me. I behold the columns of a larger
and purer temple.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.”
—Sharon Olds (b. 1942)
“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)
“If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?”
—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)