Architect focuses on Ohkay Owingeh homes

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

A project involving the rehabilitation of homes at Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo has won the designing architect two awards. Atkin Olshin Schade, a firm with offices in Santa Fe and Philadelphia, recently won an Honor Award from American Institute of Architects Santa Fe and earlier claimed a Merit Award from AIA Philadelphia.

The architects submitted the plan segment of the Owe’neh Bupingeh Preservation Plan and Rehabilitation Project to AIA Santa Fe. A member of the awards jury said the AIA is typically “skeptical and hesitant to give a design award to an un-built project. Our goal as architects is ultimately to make actual buildings, not necessarily pretty drawings and models. As we all are aware, it is extremely difficult to produce a real building, and a bit of a miracle to produce a beautiful one. A lot can happen between the drawing and the brick.”

The Owe’neh Bupingeh plan, he added, “is not, however, in any way a hypothetical exercise. The unusually high quality of the extraordinarily thorough design process, and the clarity and convincing rationality of the results of this process make this readily apparent. This beautifully explained process and comprehensive plan are a model of how such restoration should be done.

“The brilliance of this plan is that it preserves a national historic treasure, not by freezing it in time, but by encouraging it to thrive as a natural evolving community.”

The project is now in the construction phase at Ohkay Owingeh (formerly known as San Juan Pueblo), which was established on the Rio Grande over 600 years ago.

“The first phase was 20 homes and I think 17 are done and now we’re finishing up documents for another 10, said Jamie Blosser, director of the Santa Fe office of Atkin Olshin Schade. Her involvement at Ohkay Owingeh goes back to the early 2000s, when she worked at the pueblo’s housing authority on an Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellowship.

“For the Owe’neh Bupingeh Preservation Plan and Rehabilitation Project, we’re not doing reconstruction, but rehabilitation, and there will be some infill in the future, we hope,” said Blosser, who also is the founder and leader of the Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative. “Some of the homes have been occupied and some haven’t. Basically what happened is when HUD housing began to be built in the pueblos, the housing money was going to single-family detached homes, so all of a sudden there was no investment in pueblo cores, the historic plaza centers, so a lot of them began to deteriorate.”

The Ow’neh Bupingeh plan provides for quality housing within restored and new buildings, while returning the area to its traditional form.

“The process of doing this has been all about community engagement. There’s a cultural advisory team that has been involved since the beginning in terms of defining the tribe’s preservation standards, and we also worked closely with the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division.”

The project began five years ago with a small grant from HPD to train young people at the pueblo to survey all the buildings using GPS equipment. Blosser is enthused about the number of pueblo people now working on the building projects. Training in adobe maintenance is part of the program — similar to the modus operandi of the Santa Fe- based nonprofit Cornerstones Community Partnerships, which engages in restoration work on historic buildings while training crews to take its place.

“We had sustainability guidelines and one was that, because we’re going back to traditional building materials — adobe and mud plaster instead of cement stucco — we also implemented homeowner training,” Blosser said. “The contractor with this first phase brought on Pat Taylor, an adobe restoration expert who contributed to the Cornerstones manual [Adobe Conservation: A Preservation Handbook]. He has conducted workshops and it’s been such a success. Almost half the construction crew is from Ohkay Owingeh.

It will take at least another five years to complete the project. Blosser said there used to be nearly a hundred adobe homes; about 60 of those need reconstruction and the current budget will only pay for 30.