ARCHITECTURE
The buildings of North Dakota cling closely to the low, tranquil landscape of the State, avoiding exposure to the cold northwest winds that sweep across the snowy prairie in winter. Farms and towns huddle in valleys or hug the open plain, and only grain elevators dare to break the comfortable horizontality of the prevailing contours. In the few cities a tendency can be noted toward height in buildings, but the number of skyscrapers in North Dakota can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Despite this relatively small number one skyscraper, the State Capitol (designed by Joseph B. DeRemer and William F. Kurke, and Holabird and Root, associates), has aroused more interest and comment than any other building in the history of the State. This interest has not been confined to the borders of North Dakota, for the "slender shaft of modernity" which dominates the Bismarck skyline represents a trend in the architecture of State capitols that is gaining the attention of the entire Nation. Because the basic reasons for the skyscraper—exaggerated land values and proximity to transportation centers—are utterly lacking in this capacious prairie State, much criticism has been directed at the type of statehouse chosen. Nevertheless the point is made that the character and purpose of the building as the seat of State government are well expressed in the impressive height and dignity of its lines, while at the same time the structure is decidedly utilitarian. (See Bismarck.)
Utilitarianism characterized the architecture of this region before even the earliest white explorations took place. When Verendrye visited the Mandan Indians along the Missouri in 1738 he found them living in well-built lodges made of earth packed over a framework of logs, comfortably cool in summer and warm in winter. The lodge was constructed of native materials and suited the settled agricultural life of the Mandans. In the same way the easily moved skin tipi of the nomadic Sioux whom the early explorers found to the east of the Missouri was well suited to their wandering mode of life.
The fur traders were the first white people to build in this region, and, like the Indians, they made use of native materials. Their posts, usually on the rivers where timber was available, were rough affairs of untrimmed logs, roofed with dirt laid over a timber framework, with the earth for a floor. Like the Indians of the Missouri Valley, the traders put up log stockades around their posts to ward off attacks of hostile natives.
The settlers who followed the traders into this country also made use of the trees which grew along the streams, but as settlement began to penetrate the unforested interior of the State the earth itself provided building material for frontier homes. A furrow some three inches deep was plowed into a tough sod containing many grass roots, and the broken sod was cut into lengths the width of the wall, up to two and a half feet. One row of blocks was laid lengthwise of the wall and the next crosswise, with the joints staggered as in laying bricks. The finished wall provided a strong, thick barrier against summer heat and winter cold. The roof, like that of many log houses, was of poles covered with brush, often finished with overlapping strips of sod. Sometimes these sod roofs actually bloomed in the spring as their many roots came to life, and one pioneer told of the small poles which formed the framework of his roof leafing out inside the house in midwinter.
Improved transportation brought lumber into North Dakota, and frame shanties and houses were built. The red barn took a prominent place on the farm, and the silo, for storing fodder, reared its vertical mass, sometimes dwarfing even the windmill its revolving silvery fins. Except for the more affluent farms, where the homes sometimes boasted as many as 12 rooms and a porch, the farmhouses followed an uninspired cycle of rectangular or L-shaped frame structures, often with a lean-to shed at the back for storing wood or coal. On Russo-German farms in the southern and western parts of the State a European love of color asserted itself as houses were painted sky blue or nile green or pink, and color combinations such as red, white, and blue formed a pattern of diagonal stripes on the barn or granary door.
In each township appeared the one-room country school, usually white or light green in color, with its three windows on each side, coal shed and door in one end, chimney and black board in the other, and possibly a bell tower over the door. The early school was not only a seat of learning, it was also the community center, where a Saturday night basket social might be followed by church services the next morning.
As the stories of rich land and the lure of the frontier brought more people to this region, small towns grew up on the prairie, most of them consisting of one business street and a few residential streets. Along the wooden sidewalks of Main Street the false-front building predominated, its frame facade rising a half story or more above its roof. The motive for constructing the false-front building may have been to provide space for a sign, or it may have been merely to "put on front" literally as well as figuratively. Often the sole brick building in the young North Dakota town housed the bank, and the hotel could be easily identified by its porches. Near the railroad track was the long gable roof depot of dark red, dark green, or yellow trimmed in red. The school was a boxlike white frame structure topped with a bell tower, and every town had at least one rectangular, white, gable roof church with windows in either side and a steeple and bell on the entrance facade. Residences varied from tar-paper shanties to the ornate, gabled, towered mansion of the eighties.
Dominating the silhouette of these little villages were the grain elevators, those bright sentinels which symbolized the reason for the towns' founding, and still remain the most typical buildings in the North Dakota picture today. Like tall men standing head and shoulders above a crowd, they rise 60 to 70 feet above the low prairie. First glimpsed as any town comes into sight is the row of wedge-shaped cupolas, like arrowheads in profile, topping the almost square red, green, or maroon shafts. On the side opposite the railroad track, along which the elevators are lined, each building has its one-story scalehouse, where the trucks and wagons dump their loads of grain. A few feet from the scalehouse is the small rectangular power house and office building.
As towns have prospered, brick buildings have come into use in the business sections, and new homes of bungalow, Colonial, old English, Spanish, and other modified styles have been built. Leaving behind the era of metal fronts, towers, and domes, public buildings are emerging in neoclassic, Gothic, Colonial, and modern architecture. The little white churches have given way in many instances to stone and brick structures varying in design from Gothic to modern, the United Lutheran Church in Grand Forks being an example of the latter. The schools have shown perhaps the greatest development of any type of building, and most towns now have well-designed modern schools which often serve as community centers.
Native building materials are becoming more popular in North Dakota, and each year an increasing amount of construction utilizes native-made brick and locally quarried sandstone. An interesting development in the use of native materials is the rammed-earth building, the walls of which consist of earth tamped until it is hard as rock. A house and garage of this construction erected on the Scoria Lily ranch near Hettinger (see Tour 9), because of their unusually low building cost, have attracted wide attention. The use of native boulders as a building material is well illustrated in the Cairn, home of Mr. and Mrs. Clell G. Gannon in Bismarck.
Even with these attempts there is no native North Dakota architecture. The schools, farms, grain elevators, and false-front business buildings are common to the entire Midwest. Many of these, although old, do not mellow, but have an air of impermanence, as though intended to serve only until something better came along. A few houses, on the other hand, follow the good, substantial precedent of the older Eastern homes of the country. New buildings which go up represent a variety of forms, a constant flux in ideas.
As evinced by buildings ranging from statehouse to filling stations, North Dakota is architecturally in an irresolute frame of mind, striving, willing to try anything suggested, yet unable, to date, to evolve from these many trials a distinctive architectural contribution of its own.