An 82-Year-Old Crossed This Canyon on a Wire — For the 80th Time

In 1906, a performer named Ivy Baldwin decided the walls of Eldorado Canyon needed a tightrope strung between them, and the following year he made his first crossing on a wire stretched 582 feet above the canyon floor with no net underneath. He kept coming back for the next four decades, walking the same high wire more than eighty times over his career. His final crossing came on his 82nd birthday in 1948 — by then his family had insisted on a lower, shorter wire — and only after that walk did he finally agree to retire from a stunt he'd been performing since before Colorado's sandstone walls had a state park around them.

I.M. Pei didn't design NCAR's Mesa Laboratory from a drafting table alone — he went looking at the Southwest first. Touring the region before starting the project, Pei studied the Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and abandoned an early plan for a single tall tower in favor of a cluster of forms meant to look like they'd grown out of the mesa rather than been placed on top of it. He had the concrete mixed with the same local stone as the surrounding cliffs, then had workers hand-tool the surface with bush hammers to expose the mica and roughen the texture until the building's skin reads less like architecture and more like an extension of the Flatirons behind it.