Word: netsch
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Netsch tore up eight false starts before the final design came to him from one of those inspired doodles from which architects so often get ideas. He had drawn a horizontal line, then a series of near-vertical connected lines that looked a bit like the tracing of a seismograph gone wild. Then the idea of using tetrahedrons came into being-100 four-sided structures of steel tubing serving as the building blocks of a whole series of spires that would reach up to heaven and still flow logically from the design. "By literally placing the tetrahedrons...
...light that their tips look as if they were brushing the sky. No one can remain indifferent to the Air Force Academy Chapel: to some it has an awesome grace, to others a forbidding inhumanity (see color). This sort of controversy suits 42-year-old Architect Walter A. Netsch just fine. "I would rather people have some reaction to it," says he, "than have the cadets merely shrug and say, 'And that's the chapel...
...Doodle. Architect Netsch of the Chicago branch of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill began working on the chapel in 1954 when SOM got the job of designing the academy. But unlike other architects who have been dotting the country with churches of all sorts of imaginative shapes, Netsch had to do far more than satisfy one specific congregation, and one creed. He not only had to build a private place of worship for the cadets, he also had to create a national monument. Furthermore, his building would serve Protestants, Catholics and Jews. A single-spire motif would imply one religion...
From the very beginning, Netsch had ruled out what he calls "a supermarket cathedral"-a single chapel that can change faith at will, using gimmicks such as revolving altars. Each religion would have a chapel of its own. The Protestants, being in the majority, got the largest, and since the academy service is fairly formal, the chapel was endowed with lofty grandeur. The Roman Catholic chapel and the Jewish place of worship are underneath, which caused one Catholic chaplain to observe: "The Protestants are nearer to Heaven, but they need the head start." The Catholic chapel, with its gentle arches...