The Resors' primary home was in
Greenwich, Connecticut, convenient to the
JWT offices in
New York City. In 1929 Stanley and Helen's twelve-year-old son
Stanley Rogers Resor spent part of the summer in Jackson Hole with the Huyler family, who had bought a ranch on the Snake River. The younger Stanley's enthusiasm about his experience led his father to buy of land, sight unseen. The entire family arrived in 1930 to see one pre-existing cabin, a barn, and what would become known as the One-Room Cabin and the Parking Lot Cabin. The family was enthusiastic about the ranch, tempered by Helen's preference for New York. To begin expanding the ranch the Resors hired architect Paul Colborn of
New Canaan, Connecticut, to design a new main house. Work was well under way by the end of the summer, and Colborn ended up buying land for himself as well, which became known as the Aspen Ranch. The Resor property reputedly had the first flush toilets in Jackson Hole, as well as electricity generated on site. Stanley Resor became enthusiastic about building a functioning ranch operation. During 1931 Resor established the ranch as a self-sustaining unit. He pulled down the old barn and hired landscape architect Isabelle Pendleton to lay out the headquarters complex. In 1933 a water wheel was added to the side of the ranch's pumphouse, which proved troublesome when it froze in the winter. In 1938 a Fitz turbine was installed in its place, to provide electricity, and was not retired until 1955. In the late 1930s the ranch infrastructure was further developed with the building of the shop complex.
Mies van der Rohe In 1936 the Resors built the White Cabin for guest quarters. The White Cabin was designed by Philip Goodwin, who worked with
Edward Durrell Stone on the
Museum of Modern Art, and was on the board of directors of MOMA along with Helen Lansdowne Resor. The cabin's white interior lent it its name. Soon after, Helen asked architect Mark Peters, a relative of one of the younger Resor's school classmates, to "design a building in the style of
Le Corbusier". The dining room, as it was called, was to span the mill stream, the arm of the Snake River that fed the power turbine, resting on four concrete piers. At some point Helen Resor lost confidence in the Peters design and sought another architect. She apparently turned to MOMA director
Alfred Barr for advice. As a result of internal divisions within the MOMA board, which was divided between a faction led by
Abby Rockefeller who supported Stone and Goodwin for the new MOMA building and a faction led by Barr and Resor who supported
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Helen Resor hired Mies to complete the dining room, his first project in the United States. The Resors also considered
Walter Gropius but settled on Mies as a more practical choice. In summer 1937 the Resors met Mies in Paris, and he accompanied them back across the Atlantic for his first trip to the United States, stopping in
Chicago before going on the Wyoming. Mies stayed in the White Cabin, sharing it for a time with artist
Grant Wood, a figurative painter of American themes. Mies stayed for two months before moving back to Chicago to be offered the directorship of the
Armour Institute of Technology. Back in Chicago, Mies developed elaborate plans for a two-story building connecting the banks of the stream using long floor-to-ceiling windows. The only concession Mies made to the Western aesthetic of the ranch was to use wood to clad the building, for the first and only time in his career. However, rather than the Resors' preferred local
lodgepole pine, Mies settled on
cypress. Mies did choose to use local
fieldstone for the ground-level walls, the fireplace and central stairs. By March 1938, Mies was returning to Germany on the
RMS Queen Mary when he received notice from Stanley Resor that the project was canceled, citing "business conditions". Resor suggested that the project might continue if Mies returned to the United States and worked with an American architect familiar with American construction practices. The project was projected to cost more than twice its budget, and there were technical difficulties with the proposed glazing. By fall 1938, Mies had returned to Chicago and had resumed work on the project, scaling it back somewhat, but it was finally canceled. Whatever the outcome of the design work at the Resors' ranch, the project played a significant role in Mies' departure from Germany just prior to the outbreak of war with a regime that was hostile to Modernist architecture. ==Ranch operations==