A Pueblo for Highbrows

Just south of Boulder, Colo., at the junction of the Great Plains and the Rockies, stands 600-ft.-high Table Mountain, a grassy mesa populated until recently largely by deer, summer hikers and an occasional coyote. Now, through the clear, crisp air, Boulderites daily behold a new sight on Table Mountain: a taut, pure compound of rusty pink cylinders and cubes that soars skyward above them.

The new citadel is the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Built for the National Science Foundation and designed by New York's leoh Ming Pei, 50, it will house 400 meteorologists, atmospheric chemists, astronomers, air-pollution experts and other scientists from a group of 23 universities doing atmospheric research. Dr. Walter Orr Roberts, N.C.A.R.'s director, believes that "no field of science offers a greater potential for the good of all mankind. The sky is quite literally the limit." Accordingly he wanted a building to house his staff that would be "symbolic, but not monumental, ascetic but hospitable, something that expresses both the contemplative and exciting aspects of scientific activity."

Buffalo Grass. All these demands, but especially the demands of nature, appealed to I. M. Pei. As the designer of Manhattan's Kips Bay Plaza and Montreal's Place Ville-Marie, Pei had coped with urban environments but never with a rugged country site. The first designs that he and his associates prepared used a conventional big-city, floor-by-floor structure. All were dwarfed by the mountain. Then Pei took a trip to Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, saw how Indian pueblo dwellers built blocklike homes that melded harmoniously with their mountainside surroundings. As a result, he switched to spectacular cylinders and gauntly chiseled towers. "These," he explains, "were the only forms strong enough to stand up against that scale."

Windows are tucked into a single shaft at the center of each five-story column of offices and labs. Larger windows, opening out from large "think rooms" at the top of each tower, are hooded to protect them from the savage Colorado sun and 125-m.p.h. spring winds. The building's concrete is mixed with a red rock aggregate quarried from nearby mountains, and the building's surfaces are busnhammered to give them a rough finish. Then, to give the site back to nature, the surrounding mesa top, wherever it has been plowed up, is being resown with buffalo grass and other local herbs.

Nook Talk. Inside, the center is splen-diferously outfitted, from the enclosed semicircular staircase leading up from its parking lot to the cloud-physics laboratory on the roof. The main floor includes a dining terrace and an internal courtyard with a reflecting pool. On other floors are networks of offices and labs, with instruments and a computer to assemble and analyze data collected on N.C.A.R. field trips and at observation stations all over the world.

Corridors are generously studded with nooks and crannies, because, explains Pei: "When scientist meets scientist on a corner, there should be an opportunity to pause and talk." At the moment, the talk is as likely as not to be about the new building. Some scientists have been heard to gripe that there is not enough lab space, but by and large the vote is strongly affirmative. Says J. Doyne Sartor, program scientist in cloud physics: "This building has a personality." Adds Electronics Engineer Raymond Chu: "Scientists or engineers will never be completely satisfied with any building. But this one is very exciting architecture."

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