Driving me down to see his award-winning renovated adobe house in Peralta, New Mexico, architect Sam Sterling takes the “scenic route.” He chooses the byways threading through the rural and architecturally chaotic South Valley below Albuquerque, where Mexican restaurants, zapaterías, mariscos stands, and the like eventually yield to broad alfalfa fields and crumbling adobe ruins. Shortly after passing under the interstate and running across the farms and marshlands surrounding Isleta Pueblo, Sterling veers onto a narrow, snowy, muddy road into the Pueblo proper, a warren of alleys and abbreviated driveways and homes of indeterminate but wide-ranging vintage. A late-model Corvette sits outside a mobile home. Slouching exposed-adobe dwellings lean like tired dogs against freshly plastered additions, while abandoned sheds—barns? houses? garages?—nearby melt back into their native earth.

Isleta bears little resemblance to, say, Taos Pueblo, the definitive multistoried, adobe-ladder-viga sequenced “apartment” pueblo that seems to capture in Anglo mythology all that is exotic, ancient, and mysterious about the native people who first settled the American Southwest. Rather, Isleta flaunts a “messy vitality” wholly real. It’s a place where people have lived a long time on the outskirts of the nation’s economic frontier. Their homes unconsciously express spontaneous responses to their needs: build on here, patch it up there, add new windows, shore up that wall with a coat of cement stucco. Life goes on. And on, and on. A hundred, two hundred, three hundred years of communal habitation have spawned a surprisingly harmonious yet seemingly random aggregation of buildings.

 

 

 

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