Badlands National Park

Mission 66 dragged modernism into America’s national parks in the 1950s, and the rustic-cabin crowd was not amused. But at Badlands, where temperatures somersault from 116°F to -40°F and pale rock formations turn the prairie into a solar oven, the Ben Reifel Visitor Center’s low-slung profile wasn’t a stylistic flex. It was survival architecture. The bricks were laid in horizontal courses to echo the striated cliffs outside, and the benches wrap the building like a shadow, offering the kind of shade that counts as infrastructure when summer visitors need protection from the sun as much as they need protection from bison.

Completed in 1958 by Cecil Doty and Associates, the building was later named for Ben Reifel, a Sicangu Lakota administrator who grew up on the Rosebud Reservation, spent decades navigating the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and in 1961 became the first Lakota person elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He served South Dakota’s First District for a decade. The building that carries his name now spends its days interpreting a landscape his ancestors knew long before anyone thought to build a visitor center in the middle of it.