NCAR Mesa Laboratory

The story

When architect I.M. Pei accepted the commission to design the National Center for Atmospheric Research in 1961, he was an urban designer accustomed to city grids, not windswept Colorado mesas. Confronted with the massive vertical wall of the Flatirons, Pei realized standard glass and steel would look flimsy and absurd against raw sandstone. Instead, he traveled south to study ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, then specified a concrete mix infused with local pink aggregate. Crews used bush-hammering techniques to manually chip away the outer paste, exposing a pockmarked, gritty surface that echoes the surrounding rock. Completed in 1967, the resulting triple-tower complex looks less like a federal research facility placed on Table Mesa and more like an ancient monolith carved directly out of it.

Pei's social experiment continued on the inside. He designed a labyrinth of narrow corridors, spiral staircases, and tucked-away crow's-nest lookouts intentionally built to force introverted atmospheric scientists out of their offices and into chance encounters with meteorologists and hydrologists. While the building won the 1967 Industrial Research Laboratory of the Year award, Hollywood fixated on its uncanny, fortress-like geometry. In 1973, director Woody Allen used the Mesa Lab as the villainous research institute in his sci-fi comedy Sleeper—because if you want a building that looks like a secret futuristic laboratory hiding high above civilization, federal atmospheric science on a Boulder mesa fits the bill.

Despite its supervillain aesthetic, the facility sits on 565 preserved public acres and remains a working federal laboratory funded by the National Science Foundation. The complex earned the AIA Colorado 25 Year Award in 1997 for enduring design, and the front doors stay open to walk-in visitors almost every day of the year without a ticket counter in sight. You can walk past real supercomputing exhibits, atmospheric monitoring tools, and art displays inside one of the most quietly radical architectural experiments in the American West.