John Rockefeller wanted a statement. He poured six million dollars into the project. He quietly bought up thousands of acres of homesteads in Jackson Hole, donated them to the federal government, and then hired architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood to design a massive hotel that would completely reject the old, rustic "parkitecture" of the early 1900s. Instead of logs, Underwood chose concrete. He poured raw cement into forms lined with rough-sawn Douglas fir boards, staining the finished walls a muddy brown so they resembled weathered timber from a distance. A clever trick. Critics originally hated this modernist slab, arguing that a sixty-foot-high wall of windows looking out over the Teton Range ruined the wilderness, but this exact design paved the way for the National Park Service's massive "Mission 66" modernization program.
Inside, the main lounge hits you with a massive sixty-foot wall of glass framing Mount Moran. The view is dizzying. Beyond the architectural shift, the lodge holds a bizarrely heavy weight in late twentieth-century geopolitics because of a meeting that happened there in September 1989. US Secretary of State James Baker hosted Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze right here. Cold War tensions were thawing. Ditching formal Washington boardrooms for flannel shirts and fly-fishing on the Snake River, the two diplomats signed the "Wyoming Accord," a breakthrough agreement on chemical weapons verification and arms control that signaled the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. All under Underwood's concrete roof.
