Santa Fe Modern
by Helen Thompson, photographs by Casey Dunn
The Monacelli Press, November 2021
Hardcover | 8 x 10 inches | 240 pages | English | ISBN: 9781580935616 | $50.00
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Santa Fe Modern reveals the high desert landscape as an ideal setting for bold, abstracted forms of modernist houses. Wide swaths of glass, deep-set portals, long porches, and courtyards allow vistas, color, and light to become integral parts of the very being of a house, emboldening a way to experience a personal connection to the desert landscape. The architects featured draw from the New Mexican architectural heritage–they use ancient materials such as adobe in combination with steel and glass, and they apply this language to the proportions and demands exacted by today’s world. The houses they have designed are confident examples of architecture that is particular to the New Mexico landscape and climate, and yet simultaneously evoke the rigorous expressions of modernism. The vigor and the allure of modern art and architecture hearten each other in a way that is visible and exciting, and this book demonstrates the synergistic relationship between art, architecture, and the land.
Helen Thompson is a nationally known writer on interior design and architecture. Formerly a food writer and editor for Texas Monthly, she [...] is also the author of Marfa Modern and Texas Made, Texas Modern [...] as well as The Big Texas Steakhouse Cookbook, and The Mansion on Turtle Creek Cookbook. She lives in Santa Fe. Casey Dunn is an Austin-based architectural and landscape photographer [...] He is the photographer for Marfa Modern, Texas Made, Texas Modern, and Oasis.
REFERRAL LINKS:
dDAB COMMENTARY:
Consulting "The Plains States and Far West," the third title in G. E. Kidder Smith's helpful three-volume The Architecture of the United States: An Illustrated Guide to Notable Buildings Open to the Public, I find three buildings in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I've used the set a few times over the years to prepare travel itineraries, and since I've yet to visit New Mexico, much less its capital, Kidder Smith's now forty-year-old book is as good a place as any to get a sense of Santa Fe's architecture, both historical and relatively recent. Those three buildings are the 410-year-old Palace of the Governors, McHugh and Kidder Architects' Santa Fe Opera (1967), and Paolo Soleri's Outdoor Theater (1970) at the Institute of American Indian Art, now Santa Fe Indian School. Obviously the first is a lasting symbol of the area's historic adobe architecture that evolved from early Native American dwellings, as one tourist website spells it out, though the latter two buildings are more sculptural, indicative of a receptiveness in Santa Fe toward the more formal, artistic side of architecture.
The importance of art in Santa Fe is something reiterated by Helen Thompson in the foreword to her new book on modern houses "in the high desert" (Santa Fe is elev. 6,990'). Not only does she mention the art gallery she opened in 1989 when moving there from Dallas, she recounts forming SITE Santa Fe, a nonprofit facility geared at mounting temporary exhibitions, a few years later. Richard Gluckman designed SITE's first home, which opened in 1995, and then SHoP Architects designed its expansion two decades later. According to Thompson, the area where SITE Santa Fe is located "has become a second plaza for the city, a vibrant place that centers on art." If the twenty houses that follow those words are any indication, much of that art ends up in the homes of people who live in Santa Fe.
Santa Fe Modern is the third in a series of books by Thompson focusing on modern residential design in Texas and New Mexico. First was Marfa Modern: Artistic Interiors of the West Texas High Desert, in 2016, followed by Texas Made/Texas Modern: The House and the Land, in 2018. I haven't seen those earlier books, but the peeks inside on Amazon indicates a consistent format from book to book, fitting since each was published by The Monacelli Press and features photographs by Casey Dunn alongside Thompson's words. With project titles like "Sky View," "About Light and Time," "Sight and Sound," "In the Abstract," and "Patterns of Light and Dark" (as in the spreads below), and without project details pulled out separate within the projects or in the back matter, of which the book lacks, Santa Fe Modern reads like journalism targeted at lovers of modern design, not exclusively architects. Captions, for instance, highlight furniture and art, while the descriptions can focus on the architect with one house, or the client with another.
Art permeates the book, appearing in nearly every space in every house, such that Santa Fe Modern, more than anything, is about providing lessons in how to live with art — about how to design houses that are suited to displaying art. Jeanne and Michael Klein's "About Light and Time" house, designed by architect Mark DuBois, features Kiki Smith's Tears sculpture positioned in a corner where two structural glass walls meet (second spread); the integration of art and architecture is such that nature is seen through the glass walls but also through the art. Other houses use more traditional means — paintings on walls, adobe and otherwise — but many of the spartan spaces resemble galleries as much as they do domestic environments. The pervasiveness of art in these houses says as much about the people who live in them as about Thompson's curated selection, as well as about the high-desert city they all call home.
SPREADS:
