The neighborhood around Second Street south of Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe might cause the errant tourist to wonder just which City Different she has happened upon. Bisected by railroad tracks and lined with industrial façades, loft/offices, a couple tasty restaurants, an architectural-stone sales yard, and a scattering of unreformed, pregentrified stucco bungalows, the Second Street district can hardly be called a grand redoubt of Santa Fe style: it’s too vital, too messy, too industrial—too real!

Perfect, in other words, as the place to build against type, against convention, against the Myth.

Leave it to an architect with Albuquerque roots to reimagine the Santa Fe house as an urban compound that owes more to 20th-century European design than to Pueblo Revivalists. D Joseph Andrade’s house, which recently won a merit award in the residential design competition jointly sponsored by the AIA Albuquerque chapter and Su Casa, pulls exactly that rabbit out of the hat. It’s a site-specific, authentically rooted modern house that both meets and exceeds the expectations of this blue-collar, through-street neighborhood while still incorporating near-abstractions of local folk architecture. Yet it never references Santa Fe style. It also bears no resemblance to the mid-century ranch house or Southwest style tract homes that define suburban NewMexico in the state’s larger cities, although Andrade’s location and the siting of neighboring houses seem to aspire to that bourgeois sensibility.

 

 

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