Walter Netsch Interviewed by Detlef Mertins

May 21, 2001
1700 North Hudson Street, Chicago, Illinois

Detlef Mertins: The United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs has been recognized as one of the most distinguished projects of SOM and, more broadly, of modern architecture in America. The architects were selected in 1954, and the Academy was opened in 1958. The Chapel was completed in 1962. The project received the American Institute of Architects 25 Year Award in 1982. As a young man, how did you get to work on it, and what was your relationship with Gordon Bunshaft?
Walter Netsch: I was given the full responsibility for the design of the Academy. I was thirty-four years of age. Today you have to be fifty, although there are some younger architects coming up too. Of course, Gordon was the chief of design and came to the client meetings. I wanted him there. I'd find him with his squared paper moving things around for the campus, making refinements, but not major changes. He always credited me with solving the problem of how to build on the mesa. My dorm, which is two levels up and two levels down, really wowed him, because he didn't think that way. So we got along fine.
The only time we didn't get along was when he suggested the Italian mosaic. I had never been to Europe. But he went whenever he could and had seen the small mosaics from Murano. "That's what we should use on these walls, Walter," he said. "Oh," I said, "fine." So we got samples and I looked at them. Of course, we had a tradition of using red, blue, and yellow—the Bauhaus colors, which Gordon really stuck to. But I liked green also, so I brought along green. Gordon looked at me for a while and said, "Walter, if you use green I'll never go to another meeting." That was the easiest decision to make. I took off the green. I was raised at MIT, but he wasn't. I was sufficiently younger that I didn't have that full dedication to the Bauhaus that he had. He was really part of the revolution at the beginning, when America was modernizing. I was at the end of it.

DM: Did you run into any other problems on the Academy?
WN: The partners didn't like my chapel on the hill. It was too medieval. And Saarinen said, "I don't care what it looks like, but Walter, you've got to get it off that hill." He'd speak Finnish, you know. He was born in America, but would always go into a foreign language, and the words would come out marvelously. He used his hands and said, "Bring it down into the life of the cadets." Of course he was right, and it moved down, although very slowly. I often had a hard time because once we'd thought something through, we thought that it didn't need to be reviewed again. There were times when it was proper to review, times when it was not. But Gordon would take the academic building, and he would suddenly start pushing elements around just for the sake of a Corbusian proportional system. I had a system too, based on the number seven. Three-and-a-half and seven. The whole Academy is based on the seven-foot module. I had lived in Japan and appreciated how the module of the tatami mat worked. But Americans are taller than they are, so I had to figure out a dimension that was appropriate. I picked three-and-a-half and seven. If you look at the Academy horizontally, vertically, within, everything is on that module… Oh, it was a job to make it work rationally, but we did it.

DM: If you were accustomed to working with a rectangular module, how did you come to use the tetrahedron for the chapel?
WN: That was Ken Nasland's contribution, my engineer. We would have lunch at a beanery across the street and scribble while we talked. I was really worried because Gordon had sent me to Europe to look at Gothic architecture and Renaissance architecture. "Because you're going to do another controversial building, Walter, and you've got to be able to say that you've seen Chartres and Notre Dame." The trip took three weeks. I came back saying, "Gee, we don't have stone masons today. We don't have the love of labor through which something is added within the same vocabulary every decade. How can you achieve that effect, but do it all at once?" We made a little model of a folded plate, which was au courant. Take a piece of paper and bend it, and so forth. Origami. I started scribbling, drawing, trying to get a repetitive feature. Ken said, "What are you doing? Trying to draw a tetrahedron?" That's the way he talked. Very straight forward. I said, "No. What's a tetrahedron?" He drew me an equal tetrahedron. But I said that wouldn't work. "Well, make one of your own," he said. So I went home and got the tetrahedron to work. I worked as much at night as I did in the daytime. I got it to flip-flop. That was the great thing. I could flip-flop it, turn it upside down, inside out.
Then I made a model to show to Nat and Gordon. It was of two tetrahedrons and was about three feet tall. Of course Bruce Graham saw it in the office and asked, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm working on the chapel." Nothing else happened. He went to Bill Hartman and said, "Walt is crazy. He's got an idea that's just awful." And then I took it to Nat who said, "Gee, that's wonderful." I took it to Gordon and he said, "You should pursue it." Bruce went to Gordon and said, "Will you stop it?" Gordon said, "No, I won't." So there was a conflict within the firm as well as outside the firm.
Our little studio was quite excited about it. We tried to make an apse, but nothing worked to our satisfaction, so we didn't do it. The idea grew of having three chapels in one. And I did traditional things like extend the shape of the stairway—a typical Renaissance trick. Then I did some studies on the glass in between. I waited for the Air Force to select an artist, but they told me they had no intention of selecting an artist, that I would have to do it. So I spent a year working with a team of four people who did research for me. Robinson Ward headed it. I said, "Robinson, how am I going to do all this glass? This mile of glass?"

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7  Next