Q&A: How Boulder’s federal labs created a new landscape
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BOULDER, Colo. — The rose-colored Mesa Laboratory towers above Boulder. It’s almost like a temple to science, said Leonard Segel, architect and director of Historic Boulder — which works to preserve historic buildings.
Designed by I.M. Pei and built in 1966, the lab now houses the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of Colorado’s 33 federally funded laboratories.
Federal research facilities in Colorado contributed an estimated $2.6 billion to the
state’s economy in 2016 and supported more than 17,600 jobs, according to a report from the University of Colorado Boulder Leeds School of Business. Nearly half of those employees live in Boulder County, according to the paper’s author.
But Segel argues the impact of Boulder’s laboratories far exceeds what an economic analysis can show.
“We all recognize Boulder for its Flatirons, beautiful nature and the Pearl Street Mall, which is a beautifully preserved Main Street area. But, they don't really represent the Boulder that we all recognize today, which is a hotbed of innovation and progressive ideas in education, in science, in culture, and in technology especially.”
Rocky Mountain PBS spoke with Segel to understand how Boulder’s federal laboratories have shaped the city.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Rocky Mountain PBS: Paint me a picture of what Boulder looked like before the construction of the federal laboratories?
Leonard Segel: Boulder itself was a mining town, originally, like many towns along the Front Range. It tried to grow from a wild West town to a more family-friendly place. It developed a main street with a central park area. It built schools and churches, and it quickly became a very respected community.
They built buildings in neoclassical styles, French Empire styles, colonial, Greek Revival, all sorts of things. The homes were designed to look like the places that you would see back East, to make it feel more established than the kind of the dusty western wild town it was.
RMPBS: So, how did the NOAA and the National Weather Service end up in Boulder?
LS: When Harry Truman was going to meetings with Churchill and Stalin to figure out how to end the war, he was going and seeing totally destroyed capital cities of Europe. He was afraid that the United States was going to be next, and he was also afraid that the Cold War with Russia could potentially expand and Washington could be one of the first places attacked.
He wanted to get the brain trust of the scientists out of harm's way. And, one of those brain trusts was the Bureau of Standards, which was the center for the collection of inventions and standards for new factory typologies in the country.
The next president was Dwight Eisenhower. And Eisenhower picked Boulder as the location for the Bureau of Standards for a variety of reasons.
It was far from the ocean, so it couldn't be attacked by submarines or destroyers. It was a place that he was already familiar with because he and his wife had visited here a number of times in their life. And Boulder already had a radio science laboratory.
RMPBS: What are some of the hallmarks of modernist architecture?
LS: One of the aspects of modernism is that the form of the building follows the function of the building. What happened on the inside is what shaped the exterior of the building.
Secondly, it's the material of this building. The buildings are concrete, and concrete is a very, malleable, material. You can shape it into anything you want just based on how you form it. And, it's also a really inexpensive material.
Modernism is trying to use inexpensive materials to provide low cost solutions for building design.
There's big sheets of glass, so you could almost feel like you were outside when you're in the building, and when you're outside the building, you could see very easily inside. There's a blurring between inside and outside of the building.
Other areas of the building would allow you to go right outside into plaza areas, for relaxing. Scientists are doing intensive, focused work and they need places to be able to kind of detox from the intensity. And so, they need these outdoor spaces or to be able to have access to see outside very readily and easily.
RMPBS: Fast forward 75 years, do you think that this form still fits the function and the work that is done there today?
LS: It's a great question. And I'd have to say yes and no.
And the reason I say “yes” is that they still do work in these laboratory buildings, but they've had to upgrade them over the years. The science that they're doing in these buildings has evolved to the point where they need different technologies for the architecture to apply.
For instance, they need buildings that have low vibration. They can't have the buildings moving in really strong winds.
[In 1961, architect I.M. Pei started designing the Mesa Laboratory, one of the city’s most prominent laboratories. Pei drew inspiration from ancient dwellings, like Mesa Verde.]
RMPBS: Tell me about I.M Pei’s process
LS: Pei was the son of the president of the Bank of China, a really wealthy person. And he showed up to meet with Walter Roberts, and he was wearing a three piece suit and wingtip shoes. And Walter Roberts was wearing hiking shoes in blue jeans. And he said, let's go up to the site, and I.M. Pei was hiking up to the site — there was no road — in his wingtip shoes and three piece suit, and it blew [Pei’s] mind.
He had only primarily been focused on urban sites, and here he was in this really natural, rural site, on the south edge of Boulder. And he thought, how do I design a building at the base of the Flatirons that picks up the spirit of the site and feels like it belongs here? And so he started to study ancient approaches to building in nature.
This particular site has tremendously strong winds over 100 mile an hour winds on the site.
So you need a really strong building to handle that kind of barrage. There is also a fair amount of snow. There's a lot of days in Colorado, and in this particular climate, where it can be freezing in the morning and it can be warmer than freezing in the afternoon.
So there's this freeze thaw that happens, which is a real challenge because water expands when it turns to ice, and it shrinks when it turns to water. Before this building was finished, they were already having leaks in the roof of this building.
RMPBS: Were there other failures?
LS: Not that I've heard of or read. I'd say that the architect would have said a failure was that they didn't have enough money to build the entire building. If you look at this design rendering, there's what I call a tower on the left side of this rendering. It never got built because they ran out of money.
RMPBS: I'd love to ask you more about how the physical design of a space contributes to this broader spirit of innovation that you've described. How do you make this connection between the physical spaces and the culture that emerged from them?
LS: Well, what you started to see in Boulder was that significant and influential institutions like federal laboratories were adopting the idea that their buildings should be designed in the most innovative ways possible. And that had a trickle down effect so that the University of Colorado, which had been a conservative, architectural fashion on campus, started to open up and allow more innovative, contemporary expressions on the campus.
And then you saw some of the scientific businesses like Ball Aerospace and IBM come to town. And many others designed their buildings in that same approach — having the buildings be expressive of the function. And then it expanded to churches and banks and then people's homes. It just permeated through town.
It became the backdrop for people's lives. And the backdrop now was an innovative environment. You were walking to movie theaters that were innovative and banks and your home. And it began to promote freer thinking in the community.
Boulder became a Mecca for the hippie counterculture movement. It brought freethinking educators and religious people and entertainment, music. The culture just blossomed in this community, and Boulder has never looked back.
RMPBS: You've made the case that these buildings are just as historic as other parts of Boulder. Is it harder from a preservation standpoint to get people to care because they're not as old?
LS: I don't know if you've ever been to an antique show somewhere and you're walking around and you hear somebody say, ‘oh my gosh,’ I must be an antique because I have that in my house.
And, you know, it's that attitude — that if it's from our lifetime, then it can't be highly held.
It's not an antique. It shouldn't be, you know, as highly regarded as the things that came from our grandparents’ era. But, Historic Boulder and any other historic preservation organization is certain that history is being made right now.
I'd say mid-century modern architecture is a sort of minority. It's an overlooked era of architecture and design.
RMPBS: The Trump administration has already made cuts to the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. If these laboratories face further cuts, how do you see that impacting the city?
LS: When you go camping, your approach is to leave the campground in a better place than when you found it. And that is a metaphor for what we should be thinking about for the planet. We should be leaving the planet in a better place than we found it. And we want to be thinking about our children and our grandchildren and having the world be an improved place for them.
And I am certain that the cuts in the scientific research in these federal laboratories will harm the future instead of improve it, because these people are on the forefront of looking at advancements to understand climate change and better uses of the planet to help humanity. And so I am certain that the cutbacks in these laboratories and around the country are detrimental to society.
Type of story: Q&A
An interview to provide a single perspective, edited for clarity and obvious falsehoods. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.
An interview to provide a single perspective, edited for clarity and obvious falsehoods. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.