John Gaw Meem

It's a strange name for an unusual historical figure who is well known in Santa Fe. 

He is the person who most impacted the specific regional look of Santa Fe. Starting in the 1920s he interpreted the Pueblo and Spanish historic building styles in a way that preserved their timeless earthen shapes and colors but used modern materials and designs. 

Santa Fe looks the way it does because of him.

Just a few of the buildings he designed

He was born in Brazil to missionary parents, spoke Portuguese, was educated as an engineer in the US, but never trained as an architect. He came to Santa Fe in 1920 as many did for tuberculosis treatment. 

What he found was a unique town of adobe buildings rapidly turning into another midwest looking burg, with white painted Greek Revival and Victorian wood houses going up as the town expanded.

Meem with a model of one of his designs

Even Bishop Lamy, at least as written by Willa Cather in Death Comes for the Archbishop, lamented how ugly Santa Fe was becoming in his time, as buildings went up around the plaza that had nothing to do with the long history of adobe forms. 

In the 1880s the railroad was making new materials available and Anglos began pouring into the territory, building what they knew from back east. But Victorian wood construction styles and machine made conformity were wrong, just wrong for this magisterial spare steppe landscape. 

Meem was not an architect but during his recuperation from TB he liked to sketch buildings and was soon recognized for his simple drawings that incorporated history and region rather than imposing a generic built structure on the environment.

His sketches

Over four decades he formed a design company that created buildings all over the southwest -- museums, libraries, courthouses, university buildings, and homes -- that define the region. The brown adobe mud form became elegant in his interpretation and functional for the modern world. 

He designed new but also actively worked to keep historic buildings preserved. He was instrumental, along with city leaders and town activists, in making Santa Fe's central hub a historic preservation site. There are strict rules about what you can change or build downtown. 

And the rest of the town, as it grew into the modern city it is now, had to follow codes about height and look and style of what got built. Long and low, not tall and narrow. Stucco. Earth tones. A built environment that does not overshadow the mountains and sky around it.

Building height restrictions in the city keep it in scale with the mountains

It mattered because, as the famous line about New Mexico in Willa Cather's book has it: 

"Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world;

but here the earth was the floor of the sky." 

(Of course some criticize the restrictions as anchoring us too much in the past, others laud it as essential to conserve a rich history. There's big debate going on now about rewriting the historic buildings code to be more specific but allow more creativity . . . it's quite complicated.)

My home is in a modern development south of the historic district and built just twenty five years ago. It's not even close to the true adobe home of a century ago; we have sliding glass doors and huge windows and a modern floorpan and air conditioning. It was not designed by John Gaw Meem or his architects.

My house has the elements of historic homes, but isn't one

But the elements Meem popularized -- viga beams, corner corbels, stepped parapet levels, tile and stucco, flat roof, canales for rain runoff, narrow winding streets -- were followed by the developers. 

All those details make a newish suburban small house look like it always belonged to this land.