Photography by: Ferenc Berko

ASPEN INSTITUTE AT 60

The quixotic Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke and his wife, Elizabeth, are often called the founders of modern-day Aspen.

Paepcke bought the Meadows property in the late 1940s for a reported $10,000. His dream was to turn this parcel of land, once the Hoaglund dairy farm, into the cultural heart of Aspen. The Meadows was still wild fields in 1949 when Paepcke came up with the idea to hold the Goethe Bicentennial, bringing Albert Schweitzer, Thornton Wilder, José Ortega y Gasset and other luminaries to the then-remote mountain town. The celebration led to the founding of the Music Associates of Aspen, the International Design Conference in Aspen, the Aspen Institute, and later the Center for Physics.

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