Style with Substance
home grown
By returning to authentic regional design firmly rooted in our history and unique traditions, we can create homes with an organic connection to New Mexico.
A classic downtown Albuquerque home typifies an earlier era’s interpretation of Pueblo style, one of many design threads in the
tapestry of local architecture.
This article first appeared in Spring II 2008 Su Casa
Long before I heard of Santa Fe style, I became utterly charmed by the rambling, random array of buildings in the historic district of New Mexico’s state capital. While I totally fell for the sagging old adobes, I also liked how the few little Victorians fit right in. I liked the occasional brick coping and white wood trim of Territorials, too. Not far away, the tiled Mission roofs of the railyard added another nice contrast. The entire mosaic seemed to make sense, with each detail reflecting a special moment in time, built by a particular family or embodying a particular story. To my newcomer’s eye, the architectural palette seemed spontaneous and uncontrived, much like the captivating old villages scattered across the globe.
Forty years ago you could see many such architectural legacies around New Mexico, displaying local inflections in varying states of decrepitude: in Albuquerque’s Old Town, the older enclaves of Las Vegas, Taos, and Española, as well as in true villages like El Rito, Chimayó, and Las Trampas.
Things changed as New Mexico got discovered by the tourist industry and swamped by a tsunami of boomers seeking quality of life. Recognizing the threat to the treasures surrounding them, town leaders scrambled to enact guidelines and create historic districts. Some of these preservation efforts worked, while some failed miserably—and the same could be said of the restrictive covenants and architectural guidelines that private owners and developers have imposed on their properties. We all know you can’t legislate good architecture, and you can’t guarantee it with restrictive covenants and guidelines, either. You can try—but at the risk of creating lifeless, theme park environments.
All of which raise interesting questions: what makes for a successful “planned” community or subdivision? Why does that occasional Victorian work, and why does the recent sprawl of imitative architecture fail? Does it make any sense at all to “freeze” a moment in time and declare it to be the “true” historic style of a community? Why not just let it all go and let history decide?
This is a debate in which aesthetic preferences often collide with property rights, water issues, demographics, mass media, and market forces huge beyond comprehension. Add climate change to the mix, and the issue becomes so complex that it’s tempting to bow out and just go shopping. But do you really want New Mexico to look more and more like the homogenized sprawls of Phoenix and Las Vegas? That’s exactly what’s likely to happen if we don’t chart a more creative course.
There are some valuable lessons to learn from the past. The new architectural influences that appeared in New Mexico worked, quite frankly, because there weren’t too many of them—they were more like seasoning than another entrée. They arrived at widely separated points in time and never overwhelmed the dominant adobe backdrop: for example, the hacienda plan came with the Spanish Conquest, but then not much happened for a century or two. When the Santa Fe Trail opened, along came the Victorians, but they never made it over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in great numbers. That stuff was too expensive and hard to come by, and you couldn’t throw it up yourself like you could adobes and vigas. When the Civil War ended and the railroads penetrated the Rio Grande valley, a cash economy grew and building materials were available for the first time. Right away folks jumped on the new building technology, raising steeply pitched corrugated tin roofs over their leaky old adobes. But because few houses were wider than the longest viga you could haul with your mule, the new roof systems all shared the wonderful, characteristic geometry you can still see along the Taos-Santa Fe high road or in villages like Tierra Amarilla. Just like that, a companion to the signature flat-roofed adobes was born. Building technology took huge leaps for the next hundred years, but changes for the most part remained on a continuum with the past and retained that haphazard, organic feel that is New Mexico.
In recent decades, contemporary homes have generally related kindly to the older Pueblo style homes, both in numbers and in style. Hippie creations did stretch the envelope a bit, but they were fun and, let’s face it, they crumbled pretty fast. Solar design and green buildings work, too, as long as designers pay attention to integrating the tech into the aesthetics rather than getting it backward.
But the big change has come with the recent arrival, in great numbers, of newcomers who don’t yet identify deeply with New Mexico and who are tremendously influenced by the media and what the building industry offers them as the dominant style. In their minds, Southwestern and Mediterranean and Tuscan styles are pretty much indistinguishable, and what looks good in Scottsdale or Orange County looks good here, too. As long as they get the Sub-Zero and the views, not much else matters. Who can blame them? Home buyers are not architectural historians, they gravitate toward the familiar, and they’re stuck having to choose among what is offered to them.
So we could begin by offering them something better—and that responsibility rests squarely on the shoulders of architects, builders, developers, real-estate agents, and shelter magazine publishers. We’re the ones who have the know-how to build and promote housing that fits our landscape and our traditions. Without a doubt, we can support ourselves while bringing to market a superior, more authentic product—one that we can feel really good about, as well. Now, with green-building awareness on the rise, we have another compelling reason to develop our projects along regionally appropriate, sustainable lines. When we professionals become agents of intelligent and appropriate change, we can again bring to the market homes that truly belong. That will be a very good day.
Vishu Magee designs homes around Santa Fe and Taos. He is the author of Archetype Design: House as a Vehicle for Spirit. Contact him at archetype-design.com.