Builder argued that you cannot understand how the three main branches of the American military behave and make decisions unless you understand how different their cultures are. And to prove this point, Builder said, just look at the chapels on each of the service academy campuses.
The chapel at West Point military academy, the historic training ground for the officers of the US Army, stands on a bluff high above the Hudson River, dominating the skyline of the campus. The chapel was completed in 1910, in the grand Gothic revival style. It is built entirely out of somber gray granite, with tall, narrow windows. It has the brooding power of a medieval fortress—solid, plain, unmovable. Builder writes, “This is a quiet place for simple ceremonies with people who are close to each other and to the land that has brought them up.”
That’s the Army: deeply patriotic, rooted in service to country.
Then there’s the chapel at the Naval Academy, in Annapolis. It was built almost at the same time as its West Point counterpart, but it’s much bigger. Grander. It’s in the style of American Beaux-Arts, with a massive dome based on the design of the military chapel at Les Invalides, in Paris. The stained-glass windows are enormous, letting the light shine into the ornate, detailed interior. That’s very Navy: arrogant, independent, secure in the global scale of its ambitions.
Compare those two to the cadet chapel at the Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. This is a chapel from another universe. It was finished in 1962, but if I told you that it was finished last month, you would say, “Wow, that’s a futuristic building.” The Air Force chapel looks like someone lined up a squadron of fighter jets like dominoes with their noses pointed toward the heavens. It looks ready to take flight with a magnificent, deafening whoosh. Inside the cathedral, there are more than twenty-four thousand pieces of stained glass, in twenty-four different colors, and at the front, a cross forty-six feet tall and twelve feet wide, with crossbeams that look like propellers. Outside, four fighter jets are jauntily parked, as if some pilots, on a whim, had dropped by for Sunday morning communion.
The chapel’s architect was a brilliant modernist out of Chicago named Walter Netsch. He was given the same creative freedom and limitless budget that the Air Force usually gives to the people who come up with stealth fighters.
In a 1995 interview, Netsch recalled the commission:
I came home with this tremendous feeling of: How can I in this modern age of technology create something good to be as inspiring and aspiring as Chartres…？ In the meantime, I had gotten this idea here in Chicago, working with my engineer, of the tetrahedrons and compiling the tetrahedrons together.
What do you think it says about the Air Force that they would construct a cathedral out of aluminum and steel, in the shape of an upright fighter jet, in the middle of the Colorado mesa? That’s what Carl Builder asked in his book. And his conclusion was: this is a group of people who desperately want to differentiate themselves as much as possible from the older branches of military service, the Army and the Navy. And, further, the Air Force is utterly uninterested in heritage and tradition. On the contrary, it wants to be modern.
Netsch designed the entire Air Force Academy chapel around pyramid-shaped seven-foot modules. Tetrahedrons! This is a branch of the service for people who want to start over, to wage war in new ways, to ready themselves for today’s battles. They aren’t spending their time studying the Peloponnesian War or the Battle of Trafalgar. The Air Force is obsessed with tomorrow, and with how technology will prepare it for tomorrow. And what happens with Netsch’s chapel after it’s built? It has all kinds of structural problems. Of course it does! Like some brilliant bit of breakthrough computer code, it had to be debugged.
Netsch explained:
You get into technology, you sometimes get into trouble…What happened is that all of a sudden, these leaks started. And [we] would fly out to Colorado Springs and check in [to] a little cheap motel and wait for the rains. And it would rain, and we would rush up to the chapel—it’s a big building—and try to find out where it was leaking inside…I had to write a report, and I was so hurt about these leaks. I called it “A Report on Water Migration on the Air Force Academy Chapel.” Needless to say, I received humorous digs over my euphemism. But what we found out was that…each of the tetrahedral groups would move in the wind. It’s very windy up there, and the building can receive wind from many planes. And it’s long, so it could be doing one thing at one end and another thing at the other end. These joints where everything is connected is where all the glass goes through.