Excerpt from Architectural Character Guidelines: Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks

The idea is not new. As early as 1918, only two years after the formation of the National Park Service, the basic policies of the nps clearly specified that buildings and other park developments must seek a special relationship to the visual environment. During the next twenty years the Service perfected a definition of that special relationship. Today, although the buildings of the 19203 and 19305 vary widely in their actual appearance, we class them together stylistically under the designation of rustic architecture. These buildings, despite their individuality, do share many characteristics. Generally, they used natural materials and textures, small size, historical details, and careful siting to develop strong visual ties between the structure and its setting. Successful examples vary from low, adobe ranch houses in southern Arizona to chalets with massive stone walls and steeply pitched roofs at Crater Lake.

Basic to all these design efforts were several philosophical premises about the nature of the national parks themselves. The first and most basic of these was the concept that national parks were fundamentally separate from the surrounding world. This was a management attitude. Parks were sacred landscapes, and visitors had to realize that within the parks everything was different, including the purpose of the land and its relationship to humankind. The architecture had to contribute to this special purpose.

A second crucial premise was that each park area had to have a clear and distinct image that unified its various developments. Buildings and other structures varied from site to site, depending upon the immediate visual scene, but across any particular park all the developments had to share enough elements to give them a recognizable unity.

To a degree both of these concepts, and the architecture that grew out of them, fell out of favor in the decades following 1940. Park management, caught up in the complexity of the post-war world, placed less and less emphasis on separateness from the outside world and unified design within single parks. The impact of this period can be seen in the presence of numerous modern structures that largely ignore the design premises of the rustic era and seek little compromise with adjacent park structures.

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