Newest fake adobe is authentic Santa Fe style

Beverley Spears |

10/4/2008 - 10/5/08

An opinion popular among architects and designers is that the new Santa Fe Community Convention Center should have been a top-notch contemporary building instead of a fake adobe. Representing Spears Architects, the local architect for the Civic Center, I am compelled to offer a dissenting view.

Santa Fe is a world-class town, known around the globe for its unique ambience and architecture. Our little downtown with its rich history — its Spanish Colonial street pattern and building massing, its Plaza, courtyards, and adobe-looking buildings — is a precious and fragile artifact.

We are not like Paris, for example, which has miles of intact urban fabric where a contemporary gem can be inserted with great success. Our famous little downtown is a frayed and tattered historic fabric with ragged edges, gaping holes and frequent incursions of insensitive new buildings, converted gas stations, and disguised parking garages among our handful of authentic structures. We don't have enough authenticity to take for granted.

Most of our famous adobe architecture is in fact not adobe. When a group of local archaeologists and civic promoters invented our Spanish Pueblo Revival Style about 100 years ago, the first few examples were indeed made of real adobe, but soon thereafter Colorado architect Isaac Hamilton Rapp created the Fine Arts Museum (1917) the Gross Kelly Warehouse (1920) and La Fonda (1921), all fake adobes. Shortly thereafter came John Gaw Meem from the East Coast likewise creating fake adobe buildings from brick, concrete masonry and cementitious plaster. Fake adobe is a time-honored tradition that has produced a remarkably unique and cohesive character when compared to the visual chaos in the typical towns across the U.S.

Our society has been trained to think in terms of individual buildings and the cult of the star architect. We tend not to think about the continuity and cohesiveness of the built environment, valuing the individual building more than the broader context. By contrast, here in Santa Fe, we have a unique and rich style of architecture tied to our history, culture and geography. We have outstanding pedestrian-friendly downtown streets and parks. This precious ensemble of characteristics is what has put Santa Fe on the map.

Our intent in the design of the civic center was to celebrate and contribute to this ensemble. To that end, we followed Spanish Colonial building form as well as Pueblo Revival detail and massing. We brought the building to the street edge in the Spanish Colonial custom; we added portals, doors, windows and other elements of visual interest at the level of the sidewalk; we tried to save the old cottonwoods along Marcy; and we created a central courtyard linked to Marcy by an open-air but covered zaguan, a standard spatial arrangement in Spanish Colonial towns.

Yes, with enough money we could have had a big spectacular building by the likes of Renzo Piano, Daniel Liebskind or Frank Gehry, but it is not at all clear that that would have been the right choice for our tiny unique town center. Let such exciting buildings occur outside the historic district, where they can stand alone and where they do no damage to a fragile context, even an illusory yet beloved one of fake adobes.

Beverley Spears is a Santa Fe architect.