Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs is one of Modernism’s triumphs — perhaps the most successful campus ever created as a single International Style work. Low, rectilinear buildings, designed by longtime SOM partner Walter Netsch half a century ago, flank a terrazzo-and-concrete podium designed for new cadets to march across in unison. The cadets’ famous right-angle turns are a way of saying that “at the Academy, we don’t cut corners,” says Thomas J. Berry Jr., deputy director of the school’s Center for Leadership and Character Development (CCLD).
But the Academy’s best-known building largely avoids right angles. It is the accordion-folded aluminum chapel, Netsch’s historic masterpiece, with its 17 peaks at once suggesting trees, mountains and rockets. Whichever association you prefer, the building, completed in 1963, is a star—the focal point and fulcrum of SOM’s American acropolis.
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