ReVISION:
The Future of Santa Fe Style
2024 Walking Tour Map (pdf) | 2024 Bike Tour Map (pdf)
Since 1912, our regional architectural style has been overwhelmingly successful in accomplishing its explicit goals of promoting tourism and economic development. And for all but the last two or three decades, our style project has been oriented towards envisioning Santa Fe’s future, projecting its growth, and creating new urban forms.
Given the unique challenges we face more than a century later, how might we reimagine the Santa Fe Style? Reevaluate its purpose? Reassess its values and audience? Recover its design creativity and vision of the future?
Our 2024 ReVISION Series is an examination of the future of the City Different as it appeared at key moments from 1912 to the present. Together we will explore the invention and rich evolution of the Santa Fe Style and how we might have different conversations with the past about our collective future. Four unique events over the course of the year will provide a myriad of ways to engage in this discussion.
Upcoming:
EXCLUSION: SANTA FE STYLE 1990S - PRESENT
DATE TBA
Participate in an assessment of contemporary design practice and a cost-benefit analysis of 65 years of style and preservation mandates on the culture, livability, and sustainability of our city.
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RESTYLE: THE NEXT 50 YEARS
DATE TBA
Help formulate a revised design agenda for the Santa Fe Style that leverages our design heritage to address the challenges of housing, climate, cultural equity, and more.
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Previous:
Walking Tour - Invention:
Santa Fe Style 1912 - WWII
The kick off to our 2024 ReVision: The Future of Santa Fe Style program series examined how the New-Old Santa Fe Exhibition of 1912 birthed a radical vision for the future of a struggling city - one that was optimistic towards development, growth, and the power of design to establish a coherent visual identity and improve civic life. Central to this was the adoption of a new Pueblo Revival Style that had emerged elsewhere - in Albuquerque, Southern Colorado, and in the National Parks - to create an exotic appeal for tourists and new transplants arriving from the east by train, and to harmonize with but not necessarily preserve the existing structures of an ancient city.
On our walk, we discussed how the Santa Fe Style played out in its first three decades - in the context of the built environment of the time and in terms of its stylistic development (or lack thereof). Traveling through downtown and close-in residential neighborhoods, we were also able to see how the style embraced new construction methods and materials, as well as new functional requirements of buildings in the early modern period.
all WALKING TOUR images Courtesy OF CAROLINA MAMA.
Miss the event? Watch the intro presentation and download our tour guide to do it on your own!
Bike Tour - Evolution:
Santa Fe Style Postwar - 1980s
Experience examples of stylistic evolution and design experimentation that were a product of unprecedented technological and cultural changes in the Modern and Postmodern eras.
Our second installment in the ReVision series invited participants to travel back to the future with us once again - this time, to the Santa Fe of the Postwar period. We traveled, on bike, through five decades of the Santa Fe Style at its most innovative, experimental, and diverse. Our route explored how our regional style evolved, both before and after the 1957 historic styles control ordinance, in response to unprecedented growth, the demands of the automobile and energy crisis, emerging national trends, as well as the creative vision and informed critiques of a talented local architecture and design community.
CREDITS:
Video production by Daniel Alvarado
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/pryces/music-is
License code: 8XFZVY1OIPFVVGJG
Photos courtesy of Robert Innis
