Spires That Soar

It is the first thing that the visitor sees as his car approaches the new Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, and it remains the dominating structure for as long as the visitor stays. The glistening spires, looming dramatically over the flat glass rectangles of the rest of the campus, seem almost transparent to the sun, so light that their tips look as if they were brushing the sky. No one can remain indifferent to the Air Force Academy Chapel: to some it has an awesome grace, to others a forbidding inhumanity (see color). This sort of controversy suits 42-year-old Architect Walter A. Netsch just fine. "I would rather people have some reaction to it," says he, "than have the cadets merely shrug and say, 'And that's the chapel.' "

Though the nation's new churches have provided architects with many more opportunities for daring experimentation, the academy chapel was always a prickly assignment, for it required the approval of Congress itself for the first major Government-supported marriage of religion and modern architecture in the U.S. When the final plan was in, Virginia's Senator A. Willis Robertson said it looked like "an assembly of wigwams," and Congressman Errett P. Scrivner demanded to know why Congress should appropriate more than $3,000,000 for so many spires when one spire per church had usually been sufficient in the past. The cost cutters won a modest victory: the 19 spires in the original design were reduced to 17.

Out of a Doodle. Architect Netsch of the Chicago branch of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill began working on the chapel in 1954 when SOM got the job of designing the academy. But unlike other architects who have been dotting the country with churches of all sorts of imaginative shapes, Netsch had to do far more than satisfy one specific congregation, and one creed. He not only had to build a private place of worship for the cadets, he also had to create a national monument. Furthermore, his building would serve Protestants, Catholics and Jews. A single-spire motif would imply one religion, and a three-spire motif would make no sense. The problem was how to produce a building that would be unmistakably a house of worship, without benefit of using, on the exterior at least, any of the traditional architectural hallmarks of any one faith.

Netsch tore up eight false starts before the final design came to him from one of those inspired doodles from which architects so often get ideas. He had drawn a horizontal line, then a series of near-vertical connected lines that looked a bit like the tracing of a seismograph gone wild. Then the idea of using tetrahedrons came into being--100 four-sided structures of steel tubing serving as the building blocks of a whole series of spires that would reach up to heaven and still flow logically from the design. "By literally placing the tetrahedrons on top of one another," says Netsch, "I made an enclosure that embodies the concept of light and space--and that is the dominant part of church architecture."

Rivulets of Color. The tetrahedrons were covered with aluminum, and 1-ft.-wide strips of stained glass, designed in Chartres, were placed between them. By day the glass suffuses the interior with muted light, while at night the colors run in rivulets over the exterior.

From the very beginning, Netsch had ruled out what he calls "a supermarket cathedral"--a single chapel that can change faith at will, using gimmicks such as revolving altars. Each religion would have a chapel of its own. The Protestants, being in the majority, got the largest, and since the academy service is fairly formal, the chapel was endowed with lofty grandeur. The Roman Catholic chapel and the Jewish place of worship are underneath, which caused one Catholic chaplain to observe: "The Protestants are nearer to Heaven, but they need the head start." The Catholic chapel, with its gentle arches and stonework, suggests the architecture and masonry of the Romanesque cathedral. The Jewish chapel is housed within a round wooden screen from which all structural elements have been eliminated. This, says Netsch, goes back to the ancient tents of the wandering Tribes of Israel, for each tent created, in architect talk, a "non-structural space."

In the Spirit. A number of Netsch's colleagues in the field of architecture have criticized him for not relating the building more closely to the setting, on the theory that the jagged structure seems to clash with the rolling mountains around. Yet had Netsch tried to relate more to the mountains, he might very well have ended up clashing with the campus. And to Netsch the community is the main thing: it seems quite natural that the spires should also suggest giant wings, and even the hangar-like quality of the Protestant chapel interior seems in its way appropriate. But most important of all, the building's metallic majesty, visible across the countryside like the church spires of rural Europe, is in perfect harmony with the spirit of the academy. Its materials and basic forms are largely those of an airplane, and its spires do not merely point, they soar.

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