Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [44]
Mrs. Worrell, wife of the school’s dean, had noted a resemblance in the photos between the landscape of her city and this country called Bhutan. And so in the aftermath of the school’s destruction, she convinced her husband that the college should be rebuilt to reflect the style of the kingdom’s unique structures.
Now, in modern times, no one could possibly mistake the Franklin Mountains for the Himalayas. The rugged rockiness of the El Paso landscape and the lush Kingdom of Bhutan bear almost no resemblance to each other—except for the fact that each shares borders with an enormous neighbor. The mountains that cut through El Paso are grayish brown, rough like elephant skin, and rarely see snow. They’re tiny in scope—just twenty-three miles long, with an elevation at its very highest of just around eight thousand feet. The majestic white peaks of the Himalayas tower to twenty-nine thousand feet and span six countries—nearly fifteen hundred miles. Not to mention they also play a critical role in nature: They feed three major water sources that support more than a billion people.
But in the year 1914, with black-and-white still photographs the only window on the world, large-scale commercial air flight but a dream, and no cameras perched on satellites providing vistas accessible from your laptop computer, it is possible to see why Mrs. Worrell saw a connection between these two places. Why she felt compelled to encourage the recreation of a land she had never seen and would never get to is another matter, a mystery that can never be answered, since little else is known about her, and no heirs exist to convey any legends.
The commissioned architects took their cues from the only source they had, all that existed in the world at the time: Mr. White’s photographs of the landscape and his accompanying descriptions in “Castles in the Air”: “This view gives a very good idea of the sloping architecture of the walls and the projecting roofs made of split pine,” he wrote, never realizing this detail would later help when blueprints for replicas would be drawn. “All the walls have a distinct camber, and … the windows are of a peculiar form, with the sides sloping inwards. Each building is two stories high and is painted … a dull light gray on the lower story, with a broad band of madder red above.”
The drawings rendered for the creation of the buildings in El Paso look very much like the real thing; they were likely also the first of their kind ever drafted. The Bhutanese themselves, to this day, work from memory, not blueprints. Another major difference in the El Paso construction was the use of nails. No such hardware was used in Bhutan at the time; roofs were kept in place with rocks, doors hung on sturdy wooden hinges. Traditional Bhutanese structures didn’t have glass in the windows, either.
The reconstructed Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy debuted in 1917, with sixty students and perhaps the most unusual architecture of any school in the United States. Over the past century, the name of the university has changed twice, and its size has ballooned, but its looks have become increasingly Bhutanese, except for one brief period: After a new building emerged from the wraps of construction in the late sixties to reveal its discordantly modern style, one local wrote to the paper expressing concern about the departure. It was so out of place that in 1971 it was “Bhutanized” to better fit the landscape and ease critics. Never again would the university’s administrators allow such a deviation to occur.
As a result, the school now known as the University of Texas at El Paso is an acid-trippy agglomeration of ninety buildings spread across a 366-acre campus, each building a slightly different interpretation of Bhutan’s architecture. Even the 1,600-car parking garage and the guard shacks at the entryways to campus are housed in Bhutanese-style sloping-orange-roofed structures. So are the automatic