With Steeple

The interfaith chapel of the U.S. Air Force Academy, to be constructed outside Colorado Springs, Colo., was designed, said its architects, to dominate the entire academy. After the U.S. public saw pictures of preliminary models--the chapel looked like a cross between an accordion and a caterpillar (TIME, May 23)--it became obvious that the building would also dominate the controversy over the academy's ultramodern architecture.

"An ugly duckling," said Colorado's Governor Edwin C. Johnson. Virginia's Democratic Senator A. Willis Robertson described it as "looking like nothing so much as an assembly of wigwams." Sketches of the chapel, said Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, should be studied for ten years and then thrown away.

Last week the academy architects, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, announced that modernistic plans for the chapel have been abandoned because the original building might have "distracted" public thinking about the architecture of the entire academy. Now being planned: a model "conforming to more conventional American concepts of a place of worship." It is, said the architects wryly, complete with steeple and stained-glass windows.

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