Harpers Ferry Center
THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE OPENED a centralized design bureau for the entire National Park system in 1970, at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Since then, the evolution and standards of the iconic “federal style” of landscape interpretation has emanated from this place, and principally out of one building, the Interpretive Design Center.
The Interpretive Design Center, or IDC, was conceived as a place to bring project managers, writers, artists, designers, cartographers, and fabricators together, to implement the principles and standardized methods of the Park Service into material form at NPS sites all over the country.
The IDC building, built in a modernist brutalist style, was designed by Ulrich Franzen, an American architect who studied with Walter Gropius at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Gropius is famous for directing and designing the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s, an influential integrated fine arts, crafts, design, and architecture school housed in a modernist building in Weimar, Germany. Franzen’s building was imagined as a kind of Bauhaus for the Park Service.
In the 1950s the National Park Service was changing from its prewar, Civilian Conservation Corps-esque, rural, rustic “parkitecture” style, to a more uniform and modern entity. This was embodied in the Park Service’s Mission 66 Program, started in 1956, when the NPS was gearing up for its 50th anniversary, in 1966. Over this period, more than a billion dollars were spent on 100 new visitor centers, and on upgraded signage in its parks.
By the time the Interpretive Design Center opened in 1970, interpretation was moving away from the old-school “books on the wall” type displays, becoming a trade, using modern mass communication theories, display tools and technologies, like those at world fairs, expos, and commercial visitor centers.
The IDC developed style guides for all forms of Park Service media, providing uniform standards for the brand’s text, fonts, language, tone, images, maps, signs, films, displays, trails, waysides, visitor programs, and architecture, as well as preservation and conservation methods.
One of the most visible and significant developments of the IDC was to standardize the primary map brochure for the hundreds of parks and historic sites managed by the National Park Service. Known as the Unigrid brochure, each one has a black band, uniform fold size, and shaded relief map, with a consistent color range, graphic design palette, and placement hierarchy. Unigrid is not just a design, but a system for design; a scalable organizational template that was applied across the spectrum of media, and is now visible in interpretive signs and displays throughout the nation.
Unigrid was conceived for the Harpers Ferry Center in 1977 by Massimo Vignelli, the Italian modernist designer, responsible for the iconic typography and maps of the New York City subway, and much more. His firm is one of several famous corporate design firms that have been contracted to work with the IDC, and other related entities of the Park Service.
Today, the IDC is more inclusively called the Harpers Ferry Center for Media Services (or simply HFC for short), as its operations extend beyond the original IDC building. More than 100 people work for the HFC, on audiovisual programs, films, cartography, digital media, exhibit design and production, interpretive planning, publications, signage, waysides, museum conservation, and management of the NPS history collection.
But the HFC cannot legally require that all of its interpretive methods and approaches be adopted at the hundreds of NPS sites across the country. It can, however, compel the individual park units to comply with the HFC standards and guidelines. To do so, the HFC spends much of its efforts streamlining the process of designing and building interpretive content, publications, structures, and infrastructures, and applying convincing reasons to follow the guidelines it provides.
The Harpers Ferry Center is located on what the NPS calls its Camp Hill Campus, which was formerly the campus of Storer College. Storer opened in 1867, shortly after the Civil War, as one of the first Black colleges in the USA.
Storer closed in 1955 and the campus was purchased by the National Park Service, which turned the most prominent college building into the Mather Training Center, named after the National Park Service’s first director. It is one of four training centers operated by the NPS for training their staff.
Other former college buildings are used by the Park Service, too, chiefly by the Harpers Ferry Center, including the Bird Brady House, behind the IDC, used for audiovisual production and information technology functions. Across from it is Anthony Hall, the former college library, which is now used as office space and storage for HFC reference materials. Below it is a maintenance area, used primarily by Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and as an administrative annex for the Harpers Ferry Center, for acquisition management, deliveries, and security. Next to the IDC is Cook Hall, formerly a dormitory for Storer College, and now used by the NPS for workflow management offices.
Another former dormitory, at the west end of the Mather Training Center, was torn down to build an underground bomb shelter in 1963. The federal government was building bunkers for itself all over the federal arc region at that time. This one was mandated to be the relocation center for the National Park Service, a command post for its director, staff, and their families, which was stocked with items of importance, duplicate files, and emergency supplies. Today it is known as the Mather Annex, and contains the Museum Storage Area, a 2,100-square-foot climate controlled archive of artifacts related to NPS history, including old uniforms, hats, documents, and photographs.
The Harpers Ferry Center manages the NPS collection of more than 3.7 million items, only 10,000 of which are stored at the Mather Annex. Additional items are kept several miles west at the Willow Springs facility in Charles Town, and elsewhere. The Willow Springs facility is an unmarked building in an office park, and is home to the Harper Ferry Center’s audiovisual technical services, artifact conservation functions, knowledge archives, and media assets.
Several buildings were torn down after the Park Service took over the Storer College campus in 1960. Before the IDC was built, the most famous building in Harpers Ferry had to be moved: the John Brown Fort.
This was not the original site of the fort though. It was moved here to the college from a nearby farm in 1909. Before that it was at the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1968 the fort was moved for the last time, from here to Harpers Ferry’s Lower Town, to be closer to its original location, and to make room for the Interpretive Design Center. ♦
