Air Force Gothic

Architecturally speaking. Congress has been giving the U.S. Air Force a rough ride. While Congressmen want the Air Force to have the very latest thing in airplanes and missiles, they do not feel quite the same way about chapels. Congressmen marshaled some Congress-like reasons two years ago to turn down plans for the Air Force Academy chapel at Colorado Springs (TIME, July 18, 1955 et seq.). So angry were their cries against the glass, steel and aluminum project that the Air Force decided to rub it all out and start over again. Last week the House debated a new plan for the chapel. It had a hard time making up its mind.

The problem faced by Designers Walter Netsch and Gordon Bunshaft, partners of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was to provide shelter and suitable surroundings for three services--Protestant, Catholic and Jewish--under one roof, and relate the chapel to the academy's other buildings and its majestic mountain backdrop. The solution is an ingenious example of contemporary Air Force Gothic. Rising tall and bright in its sheath of man-made aluminum against the surrounding peaks of the Rockies, the chapel stands in solitary splendor, its 19 spires soaring in contrast above the flat-roofed buildings spread out on the campus. It is built on two levels, has three naves. On the lower level rear is the Jewish section, seating 100; at the front the Catholic section, seating 500; on top the 900-seat Protestant section.

The chapel made Kansas' Republican Congressman Errett Scrivner. a minister's son and a Purple Heart veteran of the 35th Division in World War I. acutely unhappy. He called it an "aluminum monstrosity" that "will look like a row of polished tepees upon the side of the mountains," and proposed that the appropriation of $3.000,000 be sharply cut. New Jersey's Democrat Alfred D. Sieminski, a veteran of World War II and the Korean war, disagreed, crying that airmen "fight and die in aluminum planes. They can worship in aluminum if they can die in it, can they not?"

With less emotion and more judgment, top architects, including Eero Saarinen and M.I.T.'s Pietro Belluschi, enthusiastically praised the originality and appropriateness of the chapel. The House, by a vote of 102 to 53, took a stand against the architects. Next day the House reversed itself and approved the building, 147 to 83. This week the Senate will begin to make its esthetic judgment of the chapel, with strong emphasis on the beauty of $3,000,000 in economy-minded 1957.

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