su libro

our roots are showing Get an outside-in look at authentic New Mexico, and dig into a grounded introduction to nature-inspired home design. Plus, Mexican style makes a
stateside comeback.
By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Autumn 06 Su Casa

Bernard Plossu’s New Mexico, photographs by Bernard Plossu, text by Gilles Mora, foreword by Edward T. Hall, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 175 pages, 136 halftones, paperback, $29.95. (Revised edition of New Mexico Revisited, 1983.)

In a tradition at least as old as Alexis de Tocqueville’s tour of America in 1831, which he immortalized in Democracy in America, European observers have traveled America and offered keen, penetrating insights into our national culture.

Add photographer Bernard Plossu to that list of Frenchmen who get it right.
Since the early 20th century, New Mexico has intrigued Europeans. They find here a place where the shadow of European influence stretches thin, attenuated by distance, the endurance of Native American communities, and a self-conscious evasion of modernity.
A roving photographer, Plossu first visited New Mexico in 1967, then settled here for several years starting in 1978. He brought with him a reporter’s eye for narrative and spontaneous action. From his pictures taken then, one senses he sought to record, not invent. Plossu doesn’t aim his camera at the beautiful. He shoots the moment, unshaved and unswept, in the stark light of a desert noon. Some of these black-and-white pictures are the photographic equivalent of that fine old New Mexico tradition of target shooting at highway signs with a deer rifle from a speeding pickup: spontaneous, emotional, impulsive, why the hell not? No one’s out there anyhow. Such is the emotional quality of Plossu’s photography.

In the text, Gilles Mora writes, “The freshness of Plossu’s pictures is due in part to the fact that he was using photojournalistic methods—controlled intuition and instantaneous reactions. His flexible, immediate, continuous response to the visual, sensual, and poetic tissue of New Mexico set his pictures apart from photographs taken by other people of the same places and things. He has inserted himself uniquely into the reality.”

Plossu’s pictures may be in and of the moment, yet that moment is often so well-chosen that images achieve universality. They are not just Plossu’s experience, but ours, as well. I could swear I must have been standing beside him when he pressed the shutter on many of these, but I have never met the man. Still—in that snowy, wet, claustrophobic Santa Fe street scene, 1980, as dreary an off-season day as you ever get in the capital, I’m looking for my old beater Volvo parked in front of the French pastry shop. And is that Larry Johnson carrying his inner tube after a day of floating down the Rio in Taos Gorge? And who are those guys in that ’60 Ford, waving at our truck, there out the back window—are they pissed off about all the dust we’re raising in their path? I expect to see the shadows of old friends darkening the sidewalk downtown by the KiMo. . . . But it can’t be them. They’re gone, scattered, departed, and those days are gone with them. Except here on film.

Plossu never flinches from the real, the rickety, the down and out. His photos reveal a predilection for back roads, the backsides of buildings, the backwater spots neglected by tour books. One two-page spread in the book juxtaposes four pictures—three of driveways or side lanes in forgotten rural villages, the fourth an unglamorous view of the Ranchos de Taos church. A favorite of painters and photographers for 60 years, here it has been caught by Plossu in the middle of a renovation. Its famous buttress stands flayed of stucco to reveal its adobe brick bones. Piles of sand and adobes huddle around the walls. Those adjacent village scenes put the iconic church in its place; and the villages are worth mulling on their own—Seboyeta, Dixon, and Truchas in the middle 1970s. There’s precious little bling on display. Battered pickup trucks, gloomy clouds, ramshackle porches, patches of dirty, tracked snow in the shadows convey the unromantic grittiness of rural poverty.

There’s more: a palomino horse rubbing its itchy, probably sweaty head on the corner of a horse trailer, a stark desert plain reaching behind it to low, distant, undistinguished hills. Three kids skipping around a dirt yard with a doll and toy stroller outside a battered, unskirted mobile home in Galisteo—yes, Galisteo, now one of the toniest addresses around. I wonder if the kids still live there. And more: dog on a flatbed truck, dog outside a decrepit but still operating bar, dog loafing on the busy plaza at Chimayó.

Plossu might not seek conventional beauty, but he doesn’t reject it, either. Images of Taos Pueblo, for instance, or a cleaned-up version of Ranchos de Taos church, attest to his unbiased shot selection. Nothing is too prosaic or too pretty to expose on film. He liked shooting New Mexico from a car, the way most of us see it, or in the rain, or under the fierce flat glare of a summer noon in the southern deserts. Muddy streets, rumbling freight trains, colossal thunderheads, burros in the front yard, drive-in theaters, beauty pageant contestants: whose New Mexico is this, anyway?

It’s ours, and it’s still out there, just maybe a little farther down the two-lanes. Thus this reissued book is less a nostalgic look back than a reminder of what’s still out there.

While others were, in fact, making images in a similar vein at that time, nothing detracts from this provocative collection of New Mexico pictures. Photographers probably already know this book, since it was first issued in 1983 and he is widely admired by his peers. But for those new to his work, for anyone interested in the “real” New Mexico, Bernard Plossu’s New Mexico should join the canon of classic photo books about this puzzling, enigmatic land. Sometimes outsiders get it more right than natives. Some people don’t “get” New Mexico. Others, often nonnatives, nail it. Plossu swings a heavy hammer.

Organic Architecture: The Other Modernism, by Alan Hess with photographs by Alan Weintraub, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, Layton, Utah, 276 pages, 300 color photographs, hardcover, $39.95.

With the ideology of balancing nature and civilization, Organic Architecture would seem a natural fit with New Mexico design. Here the contemporary culture itself embodies a related dynamic equilibrium, whether it finds expression in the contrasts of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the nearby Valles Caldera National Preserve, Albuquerque’s rambling suburbia that laps against the Sandia Mountain Wilderness, or the fledgling Southwest Regional Spaceport in the middle of the southern deserts by Upham.

On a mundane level, the naturalistic forms of native adobe architecture have been extended, curved, and cantilevered in new directions through the use of materials like steel and insulated concrete forms. Commercial buildings here and there thrust this experimentation onto a larger scale. At the highest creative level, native son and architect Bart Prince has elaborated fantastic, futuristic homes of wood, glass, and steel in the very midst of our most prosaic suburban neighborhoods.

New Mexico is represented in Organic Architecture by just one photo—oh, well!—a small picture of a Bart Prince house. Still, the book’s relevance to one branch of New Mexico architecture, expressed in such extremes as hippie-era free-forms on the one hand and exclusive foothills masterworks on the other, warrants attention in these pages. And author Alan Hess’ thoughtful, thoroughly grounded text plus Alan Weintraub’s well-crafted photography will anchor the reader’s attention from start to finish of this lovely and well-conceived book.

So what is Organic Architecture? If you’ve spent any time around Albuquerque, you’ve seen it: Prince, one of its leading practitioners, has populated the area with stellar and highly visible examples. And seeing Organic Architecture is one of the best ways to know it. As a style it eludes concise definition; verbal attempts quickly elevate into lofty abstract principles, stance, ideology, and, finally, example.

Still, Hess as a writer must give definition a try, which he does, several times. Essentially, he writes, Organic Architecture is “a concept of seeing a building’s design, structure, use, and life as an organic thing—that is, as a thing that goes from the germ of an idea into a fully articulated, variegated, and unified architectural artifact.” In the next breath, Hess admits the term defies definition but people “know it when they see it” by its “exuberant, opulent, and at times extravagant complexity of line, form, texture, structure, and color.”

Still not sure? Okay, close your eyes and picture “Modernism.” Rational straight lines, glass, and steel probably come to mind. Now picture the very publicly displayed Bart Prince house in Albuquerque on Monte Vista near the University of New Mexico—that’s it! The style seems to have nothing to do with the “clean lines” and antiseptic clarity of the right-angle geometry found in the European-derived Modernism of, say, the Bauhaus architecture of Walter Gropius.

In fact, as Hess very ably and engagingly traces the development of Organic Architecture from its origin with Frank Lloyd Wright (“the North Star of Organic Architecture,” according to Hess) through current champions like Prince and Ken Kellogg, he emphasizes the essentially American nature of the style.

Having taken root in Chicago in the early 1900s, it spread first as the Prairie School of residential design throughout the Midwest, the West, and Florida (and finding less favor in the Eastern cities). Wright and the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan (you know: “form follows function”) were themselves strongly influenced by that most American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who found the deepest wisdom to reside in encountering nature. For these seminal architects and their disciples, colleagues, competitors, and spiritual heirs, the new engineering mastery plus the technology of new materials—building with concrete, steel, glass, and so on—enabled them to “create a comfortable home that blended with a wild place, leaving the surrounding landscape largely unaltered. [Wright’s] Fallingwater was the proof.”

Yet more proof turns up in Weintraub’s captivating photos in Organic Architecture. They trace the style from Wright’s linear 1908 Robert House in suburban Illinois to Bruce Goff’s 1957 Pollock-Warriner House in Oklahoma City to Kellogg’s entrancing 2004 Desert House nestled among the boulders near Joshua Tree, California. As the 29 homes herein illustrate, “blending with nature” is a loose term, depending on the site. And a vast distance separates Wright’s angular, subdued (by current standards) Prairie style and Prince’s over-the-top, curvilinear, elaborately conceptual, truly uncategorical designs. (The book features two of his homes.) It’s like jazz: from Dixieland trumpets and clarinets to atonal experimentation with vacuum cleaner hoses makes a lot of ground to cover under one tent. The artist’s stance and allegiance seem the best qualifications for admission.

This particular stance has a lot to do with intuition and inspiration, which begets expression unfettered by the restrictions of accepted forms. That does sound like modern jazz, while the kooky flamboyance of some architects and/or their designs suggests rock ’n’ roll. In fact, Hess notes how Organic Architecture was embraced by the 1960s counterculture (those drooping concrete free-forms off in the desert around Taos or Placitas), particularly its expression in the ecology movement (that naturalistic imagery of Prince’s “Snail House” on south Rio Grande Boulevard, now Casa de Sueños).

“The antiestablishment attitude of both movements [counterculture and Organic Architecture] often overlapped,” Hess notes. Architects experimented with wave shapes, expanding concentric rings of a stone dropped in water, the spiraling shell of a chambered nautilus, the stem-and-cap structure of a mushroom.

At its core, Organic Architecture represents the uniquely American break from the “severe” and “spare” constraints of Bauhaus design and the straitened formalism of “mainstream” Modernism, Hess writes. Organic Architecture’s practitioners drew their creativity “from remoteness and nature” in much the way a mystic seeks “mystery, transcendence, and the sublime” in the wilderness. As John Updike writes in his new book about American art, Still Looking, the artistically rendered encounter with the sublime—a state of mind blending fear, awe, and religious arousal—is America’s unique contribution to painting. Architecture, too. Organic Architecture is a wonderful introduction to this genre.

Casa Yucatan, by Karen Witynski and Joe P. Carr, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, Layton, Utah, 192 pages, color photographs, hardcover, $24.95.

From the carefully crafted stone walls built by immigrant laborers to the Day-Glo plaster colors creeping into gated community haciendas around here, the Mexican design pipeline obviously continues gushing ideas, artifacts, and influence north from Mexico into its renegade offspring, New Mexico. Lucky for us. Just when it seemed that Santa Fe style and Southwest design in general were doomed to the bland homogenization of endless self-imitation—what’s that, narcissism?—a renaissance of Mexican design comes along to perk things up.

Riding this wave of Southwest style subgenre enthusiasm, Karen Witynski and Joe P. Carr have produced a series of Mexican design books (The New Hacienda, Mexican Country Style, Casa Adobe, Adobe Details, and Mexican Details, all published by Gibbs Smith). The book at hand, Casa Yucatan, is a freshly issued paperback edition of a 2002 title, but one well worth revisiting: it might be my favorite of the bunch for its sharp focus and truly luscious photography by Witynski.

You’ll get a hundred ideas from Casa Yucatan. Since New Mexico was once Mexico’s northernmost province, since we have direct cultural continuity with Mexico, and since adobe-style architecture has forever been embraced as the defining residential mode here, it’s only natural to look south to refresh our inspiration, crib ideas, and poach a few details. Consider this book open season on all the above. Take color, for instance: vivid yellow, lurid red, cobalt, mango, kiwi green, in houses indistinguishable from an Albuquerque North Valley estate. The Mexicans use these hues to great effect. (Just yesterday I saw a bright pink pickup truck with Durango, Mexico, license plates.) Interested in water features? Great examples here. A vaulted brick ceiling, Moorish arches, Talavera tile, even an all-natural plaster waterproofing sealant for the hot tub? Got ’em.

Witynski and Carr parse the pieces in chapters on design textures, architectural elements, water spaces, and outdoor living and then proceed to juicy chapters on a few types of homes (classified as Yucatan, coastal, hacienda, and the New Maya house). Hold onto your passport when you page through the latter three chapters, the impulse to book a flight being fully abetted by the travel guide in the resource section at the back. But whether you travel via armchair or airliner, it’s sure to be a stimulating trip.