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New
faux meets the real thing
Editor & Associate Publisher
Su Casa Magazine
Inspired, creative connections are rarely made in straight lines but rather in upward spirals. In architecture, an evolutionary leap often repeats a familiar theme from a higher vantage point, referring back to an earlier idea while advancing above it, like climbing a spiral staircase. As I was compiling this issue’s shoot list, I realized we needed a picture of the once grand, now decrepit Castañeda Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico (see page 59). A classic Fred Harvey lodging on the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railway and a landmark for cross-country travelers, the Castañeda welcomed untold thousands of visitors in its heyday. Even in decay, the hotel commands admiration, the strong bones of its design undiminished by harsh weather or gravity. The Castañeda opened in 1899; a few years later, Fred Harvey opened the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque, another dream stop on the transcontinental railway. The stylish, elegant hotels resembled each other like cousins. They |
shared the signature Mission Revival architecture
of the Santa Fe railroad: those For evidence of that Mission legacy, you’ll find the direct descendant of these two architectural icons in our story about a newly built Albuquerque home designed by architects Rick Ansaldi and Lee Shaw (see page 50). In stark white stucco, one wall crests into an arched opening that directly quotes the Alvarado’s bell tower. Although the Alvarado has vanished from the landscape, its beloved lines are even more explicitly resurrected in the new Albuquerque transportation complex, which bears its name. It’s this creative interplay that makes New Mexico interesting, the comfortable coexistence of nouveau, new faux, and the historical real thing, which in its time had a kind of imported, inauthentic but identifiably Southwestern grandeur. May the endlessly climbing circle be unbroken.
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