New Mexico Building

New Mexico Building
Panama-California Exposition
San Diego, California 1915

 
Secondary archetype for Santa Fe style.  By the early 1600s,  Spanish enterprise in New Mexico was motivated by the religious and colonial objectives of the Franciscan missions.  This generated a demand for permanent structures which could be built quickly with local materials.  The building techniques of the Pueblo Indians were applied to construction of the earliest missions and civil structures, with innovations from New Spain such as adobe brick contributing to building durability. This building exemplifies the form of Franciscan missions which became the model for major civil buildings in Santa Fe and Albuquerque from  1904.  The New Mexico building looked to the magnificant Acoma Pueblo mission of San Estevan del Rey as its architectural archetype.  It synthesizes Anasazi community planning with European Christian mission monasticism.  The Acoma Mission plan was similar to the Renaissance utopian layout of the era of evangelization in central Mexico, a single-nave church flanked by a cloister(convento) built around a patio(placita).  Distinctive features include  tapered twin church towers with bell lofts.  The pinnacles and low domed projections on the tops of the towers are an interpretation of Spanish mission churches by Isaac Hamilton Rapp, commissioned to design the San Diego exposition building in 1914.  Rapp attempted to unite indigenous Pueblo forms with the Spanish: irregular adobe walls, vigas, and canales are a backdrop for the decorated balconies and corbelled collonades of the Spanish missions.  The pedimented, curved gables of the church, placita and convento are Spanish innovations, a simplification of Spanish baroque.  The forms of the San Diego exposition building have been incorporated in major civic structures in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, e.g., The Museum of New Mexico(Figure 3) in Santa Fe and the Campus of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.  These forms are also widely used in commercial structures in New Mexico and throughout the Southwest.  The diffusion of Santa fe style in this case was carried by a 'hallmark event' (Hall 1989), evocative of leisure lifestyles and an important component of contemporary(urban) cultural aesthetics.

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