Pratt, Wallace E., House
a.k.a. Ship on the Desert
Pratt Dr. at McKittrick Rd., Salt Flat, TXThe Wallace E. Pratt Residence also called the "Ship on the Desert," is an early modernist house in an astonishingly dramatic and remote high desert landscape. The New York-based architecture firm of Milliken & Bevin designed the long, low, stone-and-glass house in 1941, and it was completed by Newton P. Bevin and his wife, Elizabeth Hopkins Bevin, between 1941 and 1943. The house incorporates locally-quarried stone and wide expanses of glass to blend into the surrounding landscape, and it is tied together with steel trusses that allow for a flat roof. As an outstanding example of early 20th-century high-style modernism in the Trans-Pecos region, the house is nominated to the National Register under Criterion C, in the area of Architecture, at the state level; and under Criterion B, at the state level, for its association with Wallace E. Pratt, a petroleum geologist who pioneered in the techniques of scientific oil exploration and who subsequently became vice president of the Humble Oil & Refining Company and later of the Standard Oil Company.
Local significance of the building:Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 2011.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.