Yellowstone National Park – The Old Faithful Visitor Education Center – A Cathedral to the Shrine of Nature

The view from the cathedral-size windows of the $27 million visitor center that opened here last week leads down a paved path toward a gently curved mound of rock. A mist of hissing steam drifts from the mound, but every 90 minutes or so, water starts to spurt fitfully, then more aggressively, until it erupts into a tower as high as 180 feet, whose spray may be spread by the breeze toward the hundreds of viewers gathered to watch the spectacle.

There is something about Old Faithful that seems to encapsulate all the passions and paradoxes of national parks. The Old Faithful Visitor Education Center acknowledges that: you enter the new building (designed by CTA Architects Engineers http://www.ctagroup.com/ of Billings, Mont., to echo the inn and other park architecture) and you face a 36.5-foot-high pentagonal window space looking out on Old Faithful as if the geyser were the altar of a new form of cathedral.

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/arts/design/31yellowstone.html?_r=1