The United States Air Force Academy’s (USAFA) Cadet Chapel made national news as President Donald Trump called for an investigation into its restoration.
“The United States Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel has been a CONSTRUCTION DISASTER from the time it was built in 1962,” said Trump in a post on his Truth Social account on Oct. 16. “This mess should be investigated. Very unfair to the Cadets—A COMPLETE ARCHITECTURAL CATASTROPHE!”
According to the Academy’s website, before its 2019 closure for restoration, the chapel was the most visited man-made tourist attraction in Colorado. In 2004, the National Park Service designated the chapel as a National Historic Landmark.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), an architectural firm based in Chicago, designed the USAFA campus between 1954 and 1963, introducing Modernism to the Western United States. The chapel became the culminating element of the Academy’s design, with 17 glass-and-aluminum spires, each consisting of 100 tetrahedrons reaching 150 feet into the sky. Panels of stained glass covering the structure allow the diffused light to enter the building and radiate it with color.
The chapel is an all-faith center featuring separate chapels for Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Buddhist cadets, an All-Faith Room, and a Falcon Circle, which is an outdoor space for Earth-centered spirituality practices. It has the capacity to simultaneously perform multiple services and partners with chaplains and religious affairs airmen to provide all cadets with daily opportunities for worship, visits and counseling, according to the Academy’s webpage.
“Any space that is used to accommodate religious services is very purposeful and they worked really hard to make those feel kind of as special and as intended,” said Seth Williams, USAFA cadet second class.
In 2019, the chapel was closed for restoration after suffering intense water damage. At the time of construction, the original gutter system, designed by the chapel’s architect, Walter Netsch, had to be substituted for a cheaper caulking option to reduce construction costs. Decades later, an initially flawed water management system resulted in permanent damage to the supporting structures, stained glass, and wooden pews, necessitating restoration under the National Historic Preservation Act.
Architect’s Newspaper called the restoration “the U.S.’s most complex modernist preservation project ever” in 2021.
The Academy was awarded a $158 million con tract with JE Dunn Construction Co. to conduct numerous repairs. However, in 2020, extensive amounts of asbestos were discovered in the chapel, which extended the timeline to 2027 and increased the required funding to $220 million.
Donny Tennyson, vice president of J.E. Dunn Construction, commented that over 700 contractors have removed more than 5,880 cubic yards of asbestos that covered approximately 1.1 million square feet of the Chapel.
In August, the Department of War, formerly known as the Department of Defense, awarded a new contract to the Academy, increasing the total funding for renovations from $247 million to almost $335 million. This round of funding was awarded to “address unforeseen structural discrepancies and design conflicts discovered during the restoration process,” said the Air Force Civil Engineer Center, in their comment for KOAA 5 News.
The expected completion date is now November 2028, according to the Pentagon.
Alarmed by the prolonged timeline and increasing cost, Trump has called for a federal investigation into the chapel’s reconstruction process as cadets wait to resume their religious practices in a designated space.
“From the perspective of cadets, I think we are all just excited when it does come to fruition and they end up finishing the project and fixing all the problems, and we hope it’s sometime soon, but we understand that there are gonna be delays and problems,” said Williams.
It is unclear whether the investigation will stall the reconstruction process further.