Sustaining the New Mexico Style

New Mexico Business Journal, Sept, 2001 by Nancy Sagui

"If you are building an office in Seattle, you can work with large glass windows because there is so much filtered, gray light. The same building here in New Mexico would be a furnace. Climate as a determinant of building technology is important," Moore says.

Southwest style runs the gamut from museum-quality renovation of historical architecture, to contemporary buildings that are Southwest in character but not in style. Renovation projects to accurately preserve historical New Mexico architecture and culture include the Albuquerque Civic Plaza, done by FMSM, and the KiMo Theater, completed by Kells Craig. Jason Moore and Max Flatow, founders of FMSM, faced the challenge of designing the University of New Mexico's Education Complex to blend with John Gaw Meem's original pueblo-style campus buildings. FMSM's Education Complex design became the first modern interpretation of pueblo style.

Bill Sabatini of Dekker/Perich/Sabatini believes that organization and attention to historical structure, form and placement says more about the New Mexico Southwest style than the "clothing." "If a new building doesn't mimic a said style, some people don't appreciate it," he says. "However, we can use the same principles of historical design, but replace mud with synthetic stucco systems using modern materials to duplicate the style, and make it better in the process."

"If John Gaw Meem were here today. he wouldn't be doing what he did in 1930. He was an innovator and a forward-thinking architect. He wouldn't be holding us to such strict rules today"

Schiff says that style is not limited to historical architecture. "There is a point where people who live here start to influence the regional landscape. You can have three different projects with different design leads. How you get there is the same process, but all of the finished products look different. The key is to discover the story about the location, the clients and the project mission and design a building that tells the story."

The great thing about where we live is that professional people are realizing the value of New Mexico's quality of life. The drawback to growth, however, is the risk of losing character in the growing communities "The real value here and the reason most people live here is the quality of life and unique community," Moore says. "It would be a shame to homogenize that."

Building Technology Influences Design

In 1954, FMSM's Jason Moore built the first solar high-rise building in the U.S., downtown Albuquerque's Simms building. Moore reduced energy use by designing shallow and deep-water wells used to cool the building. Son Jon, the current president of FM SM, is using similar technology today for the Mariott Waterfront Hotel in Seattle.

Dekker/Perich/Sabatini Architects are experts in futuristic office environments and designing using a term they call "future-proofing." By future-proofing, the firm is attempts to provide enough infrastructure into buildings to accommodate future work scenarios or processes. In buildings such as EMCORE, they incorporate the latest in technology and think in collaborative work environments.