Two award-winners from Autotroph

By: Paul Weideman
Published online: Sunday, January 01, 2012
Appeared in: Home, Santa Fe Real Estate Guide
Edition: January 2012 Vol. 14 No. 10

Autotroph Design’s Alexander Dzurec, Jayita Sahni, and José La Cruz-Crawford made the trip to the podium twice during the recent awards dinner presented by AIA Santa Fe. The architects accepted Citation Awards for Warehouse 21, Santa Fe’s teen center, and for the Chuska Apartments in Gallup.

The Chuska Apartments, also completed in 2008, is an affordable, 30-unit affordable project in Gallup. It was constructed to offer 10 transitional-housing units for homeless families and 20 units for families earning 60 percent less than the area’s median income.

“Working with the Supportive Housing Coalition of New Mexico, we developed the designs for a community,” says a project statement from Autotroph. “Similar to a cohousing project, we were asked to think of the relationships of all the residents and how they could share resources and social networks while maintaining their independence and privacy.

“We designed the units to be uniquely recognizable within a group of similarly styled homes. Similar to what is done in other cohousing projects, we organized the units around shared outdoor spaces.”

The homes are both efficient and interesting, and the layout of the 30 units on the city landscape is pleasingly symmetrical.

“The design typology borrows from the local vernacular of stucco walls and pitched roofs. The units are designed to be energy-efficient with an emphasis on daylighting and passive-solar heating.”

Each unit has offset pitched roofs, operable clerestory windows for solar gain and ventilation. The south wall incorporates trombe walls, specially engineered wall sections that maximize wintertime heat gain. In each section is a wall of concrete masonry units and an exterior glazing of translucent Kalwall panels, with an air space in between. The concrete-mass walls absorb, and slowly release, heat to the interior.

There are also solar water heaters that supply domestic hot water and warm the homes via hydronic baseboard heaters.

Autotroph designed a variety of spaces, from private patios for each master bedroom to public gardens and gathering areas.

The new building for 15-year-old Warehouse 21 was completed in the summer of 2008. It was designed to be simple and utilitarian, yet provide a sense of community for the teen culture of Santa Fe.

It was designed to reflect the utilitarian purpose of the facility and its setting in the Santa Fe Railyard — where the historic warehouse aesthetic has actually been codified under the city’s architectural controls. And it was designed as a flexible warehouse building to accommodate multiple functions. Warehouse 21 programs include graphic design and computer animation, theater productions, audio recording, hip-hop classes, fashion design, concerts, and fine arts. W21’s artmaking prerogatives show inside and out. In fact, the blank stucco walls on the building’s exterior were designed to be canvases.

“I love the way it has already become touched, painted, and transformed by the artists,” said one juror in the AIA competition.

Another jury comment was, “While obviously constrained by a very limited budget, the limited design elements available to the architect have been manipulated with skill and freshness. There is an admirable restraint in the architecture in recognition of the inevitable transformations the building will and should undergo.”

Skylights with “sunbender” devices, and well-placed windows, will provide abundant daylight to the interior while solar collectors heat domestic water, all designed to achieve significant energy savings for the operators of W21.

Autotroph is now working on the preliminary design for a teen center in Los Alamos. It woud be about 18,000 square feet, a little bit larger than Warehouse 21.

“The client is Los Alamos County,” said Dzurec, president and managing principal of Autotroph Design. “It is a fiscally conservative town and sort of unfortunately for us the way things work there is that you do a preliminary phase — you do a design and put an estimate on it — and you take it to the council for approval and then they do a new RFP for the architect to do the detail design work after that. So we’re not guaranteed with continuing on, nor that the project will be funded, although it does have a lot of support in the community.”

In other jobs, two Autotroph-designed houses are almost complete. “One is a full house and one is an art studio addition,” Dzurec said. “They’re both pretty interesting: contemporary but fitting to the Southwest.”