The Yosemite Museum, completed in 1926, was designed by architect Herbert Maier in the newly emerging National Park Service rustic style. The Yosemite Museum was the first building constructed as a museum in the national park system, and its educational initiatives served as a model for parks nationwide.

It was constructed in the emerging village center, in which all buildings were to have a unified architectural theme. Maier described the relationship between the Museum and its natural surroundings by saying, “The elevation of the museum stresses the horizontal—that seemed the logic of the situation…to attempt altitudinal impressiveness here in a building would have meant entering into a competition with the cliffs.

”Indigenous building material, such as native rocks, logs, and wood shingles, were utilized for all visible exterior parts. The architectural philosophy was that rustic style “gives the feeling of having been executed by pioneer craftsmen with limited hand tools. It thus achieves sympathy with natural surroundings and with the past.

”The Museum differs from the others in that where the others have frame floors to the second stories (and ceilings to the first), the ground floor of the Museum is completely fireproof, separated from the frame second story by a thick concrete ceiling, a design factor resulting from its intended museum use with the purpose of preserving artifacts, specimens, and exhibits.