{"id":206467,"date":"2025-10-22T11:01:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T15:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/?p=206467"},"modified":"2025-10-29T05:09:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T09:09:00","slug":"architects-guide-to-santa-fe-new-mexico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/inspiration\/stories\/architects-guide-to-santa-fe-new-mexico\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifty Shades of Brown: An Architect\u2019s Guide to Santa Fe, New Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"

Architects: Want to have your project featured? Showcase your work by uploading projects to Architizer<\/a>\u00a0and sign up for our\u00a0inspirational newsletters<\/a>.<\/em><\/p><\/p>\n

One afternoon this August, while vacationing in Santa Fe, I was walking through a residential neighborhood when I was interrupted by a young man in overalls.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI need your help, brother,\u201d he said in a reedy New Mexico accent. \u201cIs this color OK?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I removed my AirPods and replied, \u201cHuh?\u201d It took me a moment to piece together that the man was a house painter and was pointing to a home that he was working on.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My first thought was that he was joking. The house was being painted brown \u2014 just like every other house on the block. Really, nearly every building in Santa Fe was a similar shade of brown, and virtually all of them had the same heavy adobe (or faux adobe) walls. But when I looked more closely at this painter, I saw he was serious. More than that, he was concerned.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s too orange,\u201d he said. \u201cThe owner picked this color, and I told him it was too much.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Longtime Santa Fe resident Georgia O\u2019Keeffe is among the most famous admirers of adobe architecture. This painting, titled \u201cGate of Adobe Church,\u201d was completed in 1929 and resides at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. <\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

I squinted a bit and thought that maybe it was more orange than its neighbors, but I couldn\u2019t really tell. Then I realized that this painter, who presumably lived in Santa Fe and worked on houses here often, was likely much more sensitive to slight differences in the color brown than I was. Familiarity had made him a kind of connoisseur. It isn\u2019t true that the Inuits have 50 words for snow \u2014 this is an urban legend \u2014 but the story speaks to a general truth. Specialists see differences that the general public does not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I told the painter that I thought the color looked great, but privately, I knew that I wasn\u2019t the one to ask. I couldn\u2019t see brown like a local.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are very few cities in the United States as architecturally cohesive as Santa Fe. This is thanks to the absolute dominance of the Pueblo Revival Style of architecture in commercial, government and residential buildings. (Even the Trader Joe\u2019s<\/a> here is Pueblo Revival). And while one could complain that this makes the city homogenous, it also makes it distinctive. This is a rare quality at a time when people are complaining about a global urban monoculture<\/a>, where the architecture in cities as far-flung as Manhattan, Riyadh<\/span>, and Singapore appears interchangeable. The new buildings that go up in these places are often very unique, but they also rarely speak to anything specific in their environment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Santa Fe proves that there is beauty in architectural homogeneity. The downtown area, especially near the Plaza, is truly magical, featuring a number of architectural gems. The individual stories of these buildings help paint a picture of the Pueblo Revival Style, which surprisingly has roots outside the American Southwest.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

View of La Fonda Hotel from the southwest. Photo by Atakra, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

An architectural tourist in Santa Fe should first stop at La Fonda on the Plaza, a hotel that contains all the hallmarks of the Pueblo Revival Style. Just like the historic Native American adobe buildings on which the style is modeled, such as the majestic 1,000-year-old Taos Pueblo<\/a> \u2014 also a must for travelers to New Mexico \u2014 La Fonda features stepped massing, rounded corners and, of course, heavy battered walls. I believe these are stucco, which is often used to simulate the appearance of adobe.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For a first-class hotel, La Fonda is quite austere on the outside. Small projecting wooden beams called vigas, along with the stepped massing and contours in the fa\u00e7ade, provide enough visual variety to offset monotony. (It should be said, not all Pueblo Revival buildings are so lucky. Many pueblo houses succumb to blobishness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The current iteration of La Fonda opened in 1922. It was designed by architect Isaac Rapp<\/a>, who is known as the \u201cfather of the Pueblo Revival Style.\u201d This is an important point: while Santa Fe has been continuously inhabited by Europeans since 1609, it was not until the 20th century that it adopted a \u201crevival\u201d style to simulate the appearance of both old mission buildings and the Native American pueblos on which the mission buildings were themselves modeled. <\/span><\/p>\n

T<\/span>he current predominance of the Pueblo Revival Style has been enforced by 20th-century legal ordinances, especially a 1957 ordinance drafted by a committee led by architect John Gaw Meem IV that mandated that all buildings in Santa Fe\u2019s historic district be built in the \u201cOld Santa Fe Style,\u201d defined as \u201cso-called Pueblo, Pueblo-Spanish or Spanish-Indian and Territorial styles.\u201d This ordinance remains in effect, meaning that the visual cohesiveness of Santa Fe is the result of deliberate policy. It\u2019s not just the \u201cauthentic\u201d way that people happen to build in this part of the country, which I had somewhat assumed when I first encountered the house painter on a Santa Fe street.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One other interesting detail: Isaac Rapp, who is credited with creating or at least codifying the Pueblo Revival Style, was not from the southwest. Rapp was from Orange, New Jersey \u2014 about twenty minutes from where I live \u2014 and learned his trade in Illinois. The Pueblo Revival Style is thus an outsider\u2019s interpretation of regional motifs. It is not something organically rooted in New Mexico. This fact might seem banal to some, but for me, it unlocked a new way to think about what regional styles are really about.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Modest in size, yet exquisitely proportioned, the Loretto Chapel is the most beautiful building in Santa Fe. It is also said to be the first Gothic building constructed west of the Mississippi. Photo by Camerafiend, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

The most beautiful building in Santa Fe is ironically not built in the Pueblo Revival Style. The Loretto Chapel is the first Gothic church constructed west of the Mississippi, and it has all the hallmarks of that style: spires, buttresses and stained glass windows.\u00a0 It was built in 1873 from locally quarried sandstone, giving it a dusty appearance that allows it to cohere with its pueblo surroundings. In fact, the beauty of this building owes much to the fact that it stands out from its environment, but not like a sore thumb. It allows one to really appreciate and notice the Gothic details, which would be harder to do if the chapel were situated in a more visually busy environment like New York, my city, which contains hundreds of beautiful churches that are passed by each day without notice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Inside the chapel is one of Santa Fe\u2019s most popular tourist attractions: the miraculous staircase. According to legend, the sisters at the chapel wanted a new staircase to reach the choir loft. They prayed to St. Joseph, patron saint of carpenters, for nine days. On the tenth day, a mysterious man appeared with tools and building materials. Over the course of a few days, he fashioned a magnificent spiral staircase out of wood that wasn\u2019t native to the area. In its original incarnation, the stairs had no railing and appeared as a surreal floating helix, a stairway to heaven. The man then vanished as suddenly as he had come, accepting no payment for his work.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

The origins of the \u201cmiraculous staircase\u201d are shrouded in legend. Initially, this staircase had no railing. Photo by Christopher Michel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

People like to think of the built environment as something that just arrived, like the staircase at Loretto Chapel. And, indeed, great buildings often carry an air of inevitability, as if they were simply meant to exist just where they are. However, life doesn\u2019t really work that way. The distinctive Southwestern aesthetic of Santa Fe is something that was deliberately manufactured in the 20th century, spearheaded by an architect from New Jersey, of all places.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0If there is a lesson to all of this, I think it is a hopeful one: namely, that our cities are nothing more or less than what we decide to make them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Architects: Want to have your project featured? Showcase your work by uploading projects to Architizer<\/a>\u00a0and sign up for our\u00a0inspirational newsletters<\/a>.<\/em><\/p><\/p>\n

Cover Image: Daniel Schwen, \u201cAdobe Pueblo Revival Architecture in Santa Fe, NM,\u201d 2008. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dive deep into the policies, architects and philosophies that made a desert capital an icon of regional modernism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":206469,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"architizer_featured_type":"insert","architizer_featured_image":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"architizer_project":[],"architizer_brand":[],"architizer_firm":[],"architizer_product":[],"class_list":["post-206467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inspiration","category-stories"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFifty Shades of Brown: An Architect\u2019s Guide to Santa Fe, New Mexico - Architizer Journal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dive deep into the policies, architects and philosophies that made a desert capital, Santa Fe, an icon of regional modernism.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/inspiration\/stories\/architects-guide-to-santa-fe-new-mexico\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fifty Shades of Brown: An Architect's Guide to Santa Fe, New Mexico\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Dive deep into the policies, architects and philosophies that made a desert capital an icon of regional modernism.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/inspiration\/stories\/architects-guide-to-santa-fe-new-mexico\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Journal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Architizer\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-10-22T15:01:06+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-10-29T09:09:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blog.architizer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/4-202.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2431\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1276\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Pat Finn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Fifty Shades of Brown: An Architect's Guide to Santa Fe, New Mexico\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"Dive deep into the policies, architects and philosophies that made a desert capital an icon of regional modernism.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blog.architizer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/4-202.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@Architizer\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@Architizer\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Pat Finn\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/inspiration\/stories\/architects-guide-to-santa-fe-new-mexico\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/inspiration\/stories\/architects-guide-to-santa-fe-new-mexico\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Pat Finn\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/8943cd0eb8311f1eb5fe3c1953eb2d2c\"},\"headline\":\"Fifty Shades of Brown: An Architect\u2019s Guide to Santa Fe, New Mexico\",\"datePublished\":\"2025-10-22T15:01:06+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2025-10-29T09:09:00+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/inspiration\/stories\/architects-guide-to-santa-fe-new-mexico\/\"},\"wordCount\":1421,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/inspiration\/stories\/architects-guide-to-santa-fe-new-mexico\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/blog.architizer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/Adobe_pueblo_revival-scaled.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Inspiration\",\"Stories\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/inspiration\/stories\/architects-guide-to-santa-fe-new-mexico\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/architizer.com\/blog\/inspiration\/stories\/architects-guide-to-santa-fe-new-mexico\/\",\"name\":\"Fifty Shades of Brown: An Architect\u2019s Guide to Santa Fe, New Mexico - 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