::FEATURE ARTICLES::

Pearl in the desert

By V.B. Price

Architect George Pearl, FAIA, has been called a “New Mexico treasure.” He’s done so much good for so many folks and communities in our state, and designed and renovated so many major buildings, that most people might not know that George loves to roll up his sleeves and work on houses, his own and other people’s.

He’s a brick layer, carpenter, stone mason, cabinet maker, furniture restorer, roofer, viga hauler, adobe plasterer, tool collector, and designer. He always did all the hard labor at his own homes when he was younger, and still does much of it even now, at 78. But in the last 50 years, residential design has been a small fraction of George’s work, though he’s designed houses and restorations and additions for the likes of painter Wilson and Roz Hurley, Sen. Jack Schmitt and Teresa Fitzgibbon, Dr. Harvey and Jan Yates, attorney Steve and Beth Moise, Dr. Keith and Betty Harvey, Dr. Jerry and Marilyn Betteman, and Jay and Joleen Rembe, to name a few.

Residential design is a little-recognized part of the career of the man for whom the new building of the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture and Planning will be named. That honor comes in recognition of not only the some 1,500 projects he’s been a part of since 1950, but also of his tireless leadership in historic preservation in our New Mexico and his mentorship of countless preservation activists, historians, young architects, conservationists, and writers in New Mexico, myself included. All of us consider George our wise guide, philosopher, and friend.

Only now in “retirement” is George designing as many houses as he wants to. And when he thinks of the houses he’s designed, he reveals the secret of his art: “I see the people before I see the house.” For him, the “importance of the individual client” is paramount. Then he adds, “houses are a more strenuous discipline than building for a committee. In architecture, I do like discipline.”

It is within the limitations and constraints of a particular site and of his client’s needs that George thrives as an architect and problem solver, much like a poet does working with the discipline of specific forms. “Left to our own devices, without discipline, it’s a disaster,” George says. There is always “a relationship between discipline and solving a problem elegantly.” That diligence and sense of exploration is one of the reasons why so many of George’s clients become his friends.

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Photo © Kirk Gittings

A bright pine floor and ceiling reflect the home’s country setting, while the crown molding on doorway and shelf visually tie the addition to the rest of the house. The high shelf and even higher window casements maintain proportion below the cathedral ceiling.