This studio will build on and participate in the work begun by the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI) and their Executive Director, architect Jamie Blosser, the University of New Mexico (UNM) School of Architecture and Planning and their Chair of Architecture, Chris Cornelius and the Director of their Design and Planning Assistance Center (DPAC), Prof. Michaele Pride, and their community partners. We will collaborate directly with SFAI and two studios at UNM, and interact with local citizens, artists, and city officials as we add our ideas to the dialogue about the potential of turning a crucial but chaotic superblock in the midst of diverse neighborhoods in the Midtown area into a new kind of shared space that centers issues of land tenure, climate and environmental justice, story-telling, indigenous culture and knowledge, housing, and the role of arts in building community (not just profits).
For several years now the City and citizens of Santa Fe, New Mexico—Oga Po’geh to the Tewa peoples—along with institutional and community partners, have had an extended public conversation about the future development of a 64-acre site known as the Midtown Campus. Formerly the campus of the College of Santa Fe—which was originally founded in 1859 as St. Michael’s College and renamed in 1966—the site was purchased by the city, the State of New Mexico, and a for-profit educational corporation in 2010 after the college closed due to financial difficulties. Re-branded as Santa Fe University of Art and Design, it sought to tap into the growing importance of the art scene in Santa Fe but it too closed for financial reasons in 2018. The turn to the arts had actually begun earlier in 1999, when the College of Santa Fe commissioned the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta to design an ambitious new Visual Arts Center to house and represent the investment in the arts. Phase I of that project was built and still houses the Santa Fe Art Institute, an independent, community-engaged non-profit sponsoring artists’ residencies and outreach—and one of our partners for this studio (https://sfai.org).
This is not the Santa Fe that tourists and the jet-set from the coasts see, of the historic Plaza, pueblo-revival adobes, and the Canyon Road gallery scene, and yet it lies at the geographic and demographic center of the city and therefore of an extraordinary regional landscape and mix of cultures. Indeed, the SFAI and their partners have talked about shifting the center of gravity in Santa Fe around and through this site. They describe their vision in this way:
We imagine, instead of a cloistered campus that is fenced along its entire perimeter, a thriving Midtown district with homes, small businesses, parks, grocery stores, restaurants, healthcare, social services, educational institutions, and arts and culture organizations all connected through green and walkable infrastructure. We imagine the Midtown Site as a bridge—connecting Santa Fe’s north and south sides, connecting urban, rural and tribal New Mexico, and connecting New Mexico with the world.
We are excited for the potential of better connected neighborhoods with excellent urban design and pedestrian zones, and for new financial capital in Midtown that is grounded by bold, community-based, anti-displacement policies. We imagine the Midtown Site as a vibrant arts, culture, and creative hub that is connected to enterprise, industry, and social services, and which can completely redefine how we as a community invest in local artists and regional Indigenous and Hispanic, Chicano, Latinx cultures and communities.
The studio will begin with an intensive period of site research, including the richly layered and brutally colonized landscapes and cultures of the region, from Ancestral Pueblo cultures and sites, to waves of European conquistadores and settlers arriving along historic trails, rail lines, and highways, to later struggles for identity and image, and finally, the most recent invasion by tourism, real estate, and the high-end art market. Engaging indigenous thought and critique with the complexities of contemporary issues and culture the studio will elicit new ways of being in the world— both urbanistically and architecturally. The studio will also explore responses to climate and landscape through the lens of material cultures and infrastructures and begin, through a series of exercises—both site and non-site-specific—to formulate hypotheses about an experimental and multi-scalar approach to the issues and opportunities we identify.
During these weeks, we will connect with some of our partners in New Mexico via Zoom so we can get to know them and their perspectives on what is at stake. We will also begin individual and collaborative work, to be continued throughout the semester and especially with our colleagues in Santa Fe, on land acknowledgements that includes both New Haven and Santa Fe, and other places that may be personally meaningful. This work will be conducted through diverse media that engage the spatial, material, and spiritual dimensions of land acknowledgement as well as its historical and legal dimensions (see the land acknowledgements below, one textual by a Santa Fe-based dance company called Dancing Earth, the second cartographic, used by the Yale School of Architecture and designed by Anjelica Gallegos, M.Arch. 2021)
During travel week, we will be on-site in Santa Fe, and also in Albuquerque where the UNM students are based. We will of course arrange some explorations of other sites in the region, including Bandelier National Monument, Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, and Abiquiu among others, and along the way experience the amazing high desert landscape and drop in on some more recent architectural projects that seek to embody the elusive “spirit of the place,” often through strategies of cultural appropriation and displacement, but also through tactical resistance and celebration of site and landscape.
Back in New Haven, we will develop proposals that respond to what we have seen and learned, ranging in scale from the community, with its landscape, infrastructure, and public spaces, to the detailed architectural and material description of the interface between public and private spaces, light and dark, cool and hot, wet and dry, building and landscape. Through a focus on material, climate and infrastructure architectural proposals will experiment with new cultures, lifestyles and building technologies that grapple with the precise ecologies of desert environments engaging both their ancestral and contemporary cultures to materialize alternative futures. All this in the service of a vision of a Midtown community that is diverse and inclusive, connected and productive, just and equitable, sustainable and resilient. We hope for and expect a spirit of experiment but based on rigorous research and critical thought about the social, political, and culture dynamics that are shaping this special region.