What to See in Petrified Forest National Park - Top Sights and Attractions

The Painted Desert Community Complex is the administrative center of Petrified Forest National Park. The community center includes administrative facilities, utility structures and National Park Service employee housing, planned by architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander as part of the Mission 66 park facilities improvement program. Work on the community began in 1961 and was completed by 1965. The complex contrasts with earlier Park Service architecture that sought to blend with the environment. The Painted Desert community used straight manufactured materials that deliberately draw a contrast with the natural environment.

The most significant building is the Painted Desert Visitor Center, designed as a severely modernist structure that includes administrative offices. a visitor center, an auditorium, a clinic and staff apartments. Other structures include a community center, school and a Fred Harvey Company concession building.

Neutra and Alexander paid particular attention to the division of the complex into public and private areas, using low walls to divide the Park Service service area from the central zone, and setting the inward-facing residential areas at a distance. Pedestrian circulation paths are used as defining organizing elements.

The original landscape design used non-native plants that required regular watering. Removal of irrigation caused these plants to die, altering the landscape.

The complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005, and was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 2016.^[2]

Historical place in the Navajo County, Arizona. Agate House is a partially reconstructed Puebloan building in Petrified Forest National Park, built almost entirely of petrified wood. The eight-room pueblo has been dated to approximately the year 900 and occupied through 1200, of the Pueblo II and Pueblo III periods. The agatized wood was laid in a clay mortar, in lieu of the more usual sandstone-and-mortar masonry of the area.

The ruins of Agate House were reconstructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933-34 under the direction of C.B. Cosgrove Jr. of the New Mexico Laboratory of Anthropology. Room 7 was fully reconstructed with a new roof. Room 2's walls were rebuilt to a height of five feet, but not roofed, and the remaining walls were rebuilt to a height of two or three feet.^[3]