Herbert Maier

Herbert Maier (January 2, 1893 – February 23, 1969) was an American architect and public administrator, most notable as an architect for his work at Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Parks. Maier, as a consultant to the National Park Service, designed four trailside museums in Yellowstone, three of which survive as National Historic Landmarks. Maier played a significant role in the Park Service's use of the National Park Service Rustic style of architecture in western national parks.

Maier was a native of San Francisco and a University of California, Berkeley graduate, who began a collaboration with Ansel F. Hall, a Park Service interpretation specialist, in 1921 by providing Hall with sketches for a museum that Hall had proposed in the Yosemite valley. In 1923, Hall's project was funded by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial fund, and was completed to Maier's design in collaboration with landscape architect Thomas Chalmers Vint in 1925. This project was followed by an observation station at Yavapai Point on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in 1928, and the Bear Mountain museum in New York's Palisades Interstate Park the same year. The three projects represented the first examples of park buildings as small museums intended to interpret their surroundings to park visitors.

At Yellowstone, the trailside museums evolved into a system of four buildings, again sponsored by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial fund. These four museums, opened from 1928 to 1931, interpreted the features found along the park's Grand Loop Road to passing visitors. All four museums employed a distinct style of rustic, natural materials used in a way that promoted an intimacy between the landscape and the structures.

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