Susanna Gamble has a pretty discerning eye, having worked in interior design. It all stands to reason when you’re the granddaughter of the man who conceptualized West Baden Springs Hotel.
Susanna’s paternal grandfather was Harrison Albright, the architect commissioned
to design West Baden Springs Hotel when it was rebuilt in 1901-02 after a fire
gutted the original structure. A few weeks ago, Susanna traveled from California to see
for the first time the hotel her grandfather brought to life.
First impressions of the hotel upon stepping foot in the
atrium for the first time? Susanna speaks not only as a proud descendant, but
as someone with the same professional eye for creativity and detail as her
grandfather possessed.
“The first thing that
stood out to me was the choice of colors. And the detail of the windows and the
balconies and everything. I think I looked straight ahead and felt the balance.
Everything seems to be in such balance. There’s nothing that sticks out as
wrong. And looking up at the (dome) and saying, ‘there it is.’”
Susanna has seen pictures, heard the tales, wanted to see
West Baden Springs Hotel in person since she was a teenager. “I’ve always
wanted to come and I turned 80 this year,” she says, “and my dear friend says, ‘We’ve
got to go.’ So we’re doing it.”
Susanna never knew her grandfather since Harrison Albright
died six years before she was born. But she remembers as a kid always wanting
to slide down at the banister of the well-appointed home where her grandmother
continued to live. Harrison indulged Susanna’s father (also named Harrison) and
his two other children with pony rides and the finest things in life, thanks to
the wealth he built from a career that started when he opened his first
architecture firm at age 20.
Harrison Albright was still relatively young — just 35 — when
all the pieces fell in place for him to design the hotel that would soon be
heralded as “The Eighth Wonder of the World.” Lee Sinclair, the West Baden
Springs Hotel owner who was planning to rebuild his hotel bigger and better
after the fire, contacted several renowned architects initially. All of them told
Sinclair his vision for a domed hotel was impractical. Especially considering Sinclair
planned to have his new hotel built and reopened within a year’s time.
These two photos reveal how quickly West Baden Springs Hotel took shape. The photo above is from early stages of construction on Nov. 1, 1901. By Jan. 15 of 1902 in the photo below, all six of the hotel's stories were up. Look closely and see some of the workers standing around the top.
“My grandfather conceived this on the train coming here to
be interviewed. The way I heard it was he had completed this dome on the statehouse
building in West Virginia where he was the state architect. And then he read
this advertisement from Mr. Sinclair wanting an architect for a new hotel that
was going to be at West Baden Springs. So he responded and he was on the train
and conceived the idea of having the hotel as a donut shape,” with a ring of
guestrooms surrounding an immense atrium crowned by a dome 200 feet wide and
100 feet high.
“I don’t know any of the details of how he (carried out) how
he did it,” Susanna continued. “In those days you didn’t have AutoCAD (computerized
drafting software) to help you out with your plans. I have studied interior
design, and to draw that out with pencil and small tools is very difficult,
time consuming. So to see all the details that went into designing this hotel
just boggles my mind.”
Though West Baden Springs Hotel quickly boomed in popularity
after it opened in 1902, Harrison Albright moved on, becoming involved in building
hotels that popped up along the Santa Fe Railroad. He ended up in Los Angeles
where he moved his practice, designed some of San Diego’s most beautiful hotels
and buildings, and was named California’s Architect of the Year posthumously after
his passing.
Yet the crown jewel of Harrison Albright’s career remains right here in the Heartland, where practically all the first-time visitors at West Baden Springs Hotel have the same reaction that Albright’s own granddaughter did.
“To walk into this atrium was just fantastic. Just couldn’t
believe how beautiful it is,” Susanna says, pausing to chuckle in awe, “and how
big it is.”