The Aspen Institute , founded in 1950, was the brainchild of Chicago natives Elizabeth and Walter Paepcke as an ideal gathering place in the picturesque Colorado landscape for thinkers, leaders, artists, and musicians to converge. A forum where people from all walks of life could congregate and reflect on the underlying values of society and culture. In 1945 the Paepckes enlisted the multitalented Austrian artist and architect Herbert Bayer, widely regarded as the last master of Germany’s famed Bauhaus group, to design a postwar version of a modern utopia utilizing the architectural vocabulary of European Modernism. The campus, completed in 1949, would fuse the disciplines of graphic design, typography, photography and photomontage, architecture, landscape, and interior design.

Join me and the Institute's own Betty Schou on a tour of Bayer’s campus , which is just as relevant today as it was when it was built.

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Don't miss Lee F. Mindel's painterly photographs of Aspen, Colorado's fall foliage

Check out more of Mindel's posts at The Architect's Eye