Architect nets Citation Award for Santa Fe house

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

Building green doesn’t necessarily mean spending lots of it, according to Gabriel Browne of Praxis Design/Build. His Rothstein/Meckler Residence won a Citation Award from the Santa Fe chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The new house (in itself a rarity these days) qualified for the highest, Platinum, certification in the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) rating system — and was done for about $189 per square foot.

Scott Rothstein and Marcia Meckler approached Praxis in 2009 with a desire to retire in Santa Fe. She is a doctor with the U.S. State Department and he is an artist. They had “a very limited budget” for a home, Browne said.

The lot is part of Tres Placitas del Rio, a 2.5-acre cohousing project located at 1710 W. Alameda Street, with 11 households around a large open space.

“The clients came to me with a 2,300-square-foot, L- shaped lot that wraps around two parking spaces [defined as part of the Tres Placitas del Rio site plan], and they wanted a 3-bedroom house, 1,700 square feet, with a detached studio. It was an almost impossible program.”

The solution was to take the typical house and turn it upside-down. The master bedroom and the owners’ studios are on the ground floor; one of the studios is detached, and the space between it and the larger building forms a little courtyard.

Notched into the tops of the tan-stuccoed ground- floor buildings is a gray-stuccoed, deeply cantilevered, rectangular box that comprises the gallery, kitchen, and dining room. A tall, narrow, mass, enclosing the stairway, is stuccoed red to clarify the entry.

“The whole place was designed around this gallery, which is what most people call the living room,” Browne said. “Scott talks continually about curating his folk-art collection into this space. Designing it this way also takes the living spaces and lifts them away from parking and traffic, so they’re quieter and more serene.

“The clients have lived for years in Asia, so tight, intimate spaces like the tiny courtyard aren’t the least bit troubling to them. They also weren’t terribly concerned about green ideas, but we had to meet the city’s green- building code and then I realized we weren’t far from a LEED certification. They told me if I wanted to get the New Mexico sustainable-building tax credit, I could pursue it. So I did radon abatement, improved the insulation, including under the slab, and the two walls facing on Alameda are concrete block for acoustic and thermal mass.”

Among the nearly 30 categories on which the Praxis house gained substantial LEED points were exceptional energy performance, environmentally preferable products, very high-efficiency fixtures and fittings, drought-tolerant landscaping and rainwater harvesting system, and the fact that this was an infill project.

Browne says this is the seventh house in Santa Fe to achieve the LEED Platinum certification, “but it is the first non-production, detached custom home in New Mexico to do so at minimal cost.” The Rothstein/Meckler house also achieved the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Indoor AirPlus certification.

Looking at materials used in the home, the floor of the gallery is sealed particleboard, made from sustainably harvested wood. This simple, low-cost surface contrasts with handsome slate-tile floors in the small kitchen and bathroom.

The bathroom shower has walls of corrugated steel, the fixtures attached with custom-made trim plates that are simultaneously reminiscent of New York industrial and New Mexico tinwork, and with a vertical slot of glass bricks bringing light from outside. The kitchen is equipped with stainless-steel appliances and birch cabinets. “These appliances are very basic,” Browne said. “I spent more designing the kitchen than I did building it.

“I designed the whole house in Google Sketchup. My clients have it on computer in Bangkok. I could e-mail the plan to them and while I was sleeping they’d open it and move around inside and change a wall height or something, then when I woke up, I’d have a four-page e-mail all about it. It was totally collaborative.”


AIA Santa Fe held its annual Design Excellence Awards on Dec. 8. Jury chair Harry Teague, who presented the awards, read the jurors’ comments about the Rothstein/Meckler Residence. One of them, Glenn Rappaport, complimented the home’s “simple, stacked volumes that abstract and transcend the typical southwestern vernacular.”

Teague, principal of Harry Teague Architects in Basalt, Colo., spoke of the “tough times” and said the AIA panel this year decided unanimously “under these extraordinary circumstances that this is not the right time for a fashion show! While good design has many varied criteria, we have chosen to emphasize qualities that to us are an appropriate response to our time.

“In short we have chosen buildings that are functional, economical, efficient, nurturing of the community, sustainable, and authentic.”

The other winners are Autotroph Design, Citation Award for Warehouse 21 and Citation Award for Chuska Apartments, Gallup; Ellis/Browning Architects, Merit Award for the Academy for Technology and the Classics; and Atkin Olshin Schade Architects, Honor Award for Owe’neh Bupingeh Preservation Plan and Rehabilitation Project at Ohkay Owingeh.