The University of New Mexico’s main campus has been a cherished icon of New Mexican identity and a nurturing home for generations of scholars and alumni for over the last hundred years. Created during the first flowering of a regional aesthetic in the Southwest in the early 20th century and reaching a form of creative illumination in the 1930s and 1940s, UNM’s main campus on Central Avenue is a unique architectural expression admired for its fidelity to what New Mexicans call querencia, or love of place. Since WWII, that architectural querencia has been sustained by the imaginations of both regionalists and modernists working in harmony out of respect for New Mexico and what it means to those of us who love it.
But in the last five years or so, something odd and, I have to say, deeply disturbing, has disrupted the architectural integrity of the main campus. Some jarringly arrogant buildings — buildings completely out of context with the traditions of the campus — have been allowed to sneak in, despite a long history of design review and campus planning documents that call for the preservation of the traditional character of the campus. These documents include the Campus Heritage Preservation Plan of 2006 (PDF), the Central Campus Consolidated Master Plan of 2009 (PDF) and the Design Principles and Guidelines for Development of the Main Campus of 2007 (PDF).
Those plans and guidelines have been completely ignored of late. I’m sure it’s due partly to the pandemic, but it can also be attributed to a blind eye on the part of the Regents, as well as to the revolving door turnover in leadership at the school. What’s happened is a sort of recolonization of the New Mexican soul of the campus by the ideologies of supremacy-minded designers from the ostentatious “major centers” on the East and West Coast and the Midwest. The result is the appearance of scientized, modernist structures — often bone white, anonymous, anyplace buildings that are, to many New Mexicans and UNM alumni, blatantly disrespectful. Such buildings signal a prejudicial view of regionalism, seeing it not as a form of unique identity but as a tawdry provincialism.
The new buildings in question are the McKinnon Center of Management, the remodeled Farris Engineering Center, the Physics & Astronomy and Interdisciplinary Science (PAÍS) Building and the Johnson Gym expansion. All were in the planning stage well before the pandemic hit, but were finished in 2018 or 2019, before any meaningful public reaction could be mounted. Now the vast white expanse of the Physics and Astronomy building near Yale and Central and Johnson Gym’s funky modernist exterior at Stanford and Central dominate the initial appearance of the UNM campus, turning its unique image into an imposing, nondescript reference to no place in particular. The pandemic, I think, muffled the outcry against such disrespect.
But all that’s changing, and with it comes a sense of hope, if UNM’s administration listens and agrees. Last June, hotelier Jim Long (of Hotel Albuquerque and Hotel Chaco) and cultural historian Chris Wilson (“The Myth of Santa Fe”) issued “A Call to Revitalize UNM’s Main Campus Identity.” They decried the recent breakdown of the campus’ architectural integrity, defending it as “an identity that ennobles education and the pursuit of knowledge, while facilitating institutional branding.”
Long and Wilson call for reactivating the university’s Design Review Board, which hasn’t met since 2014 but would presumably follow the direction of existing campus plans. They also urge the development of design guidelines for new buildings and landscapes on the main campus. In addition, they would like to see a “clear set of procedures for the participation of the Regents, upper administration, appropriate departments, the Campus Preservation Committee and the Design Review Board in the review of the remodeling of existing buildings….” And finally, they want every new Regent and administrator to receive an introduction to “campus identity, design history, and the review process” as part of their orientation.
Coming from two distinguished community leaders with long histories of describing and enshrining New Mexico’s unique identity, these recommendations deserve serious and immediate, on-the-record consideration.
But why, you may ask, in politically crazy and environmentally dangerous times like our own does “campus identity,” architectural regionalism and conserving a sense of place matter all at all? They matter in the same way that preserving wilderness and endangered species matter. Once such things are completely ruined, nothing can reclaim them.
UNM’s campus is a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. It nourishes many of us in the same way that the sea nourished John F. Kennedy and Rachael Carson and gave them a human understanding of the importance of environmental integrity and its conservation. The preservation of any object of New Mexico’s sense of querencia, one of a great many that exist all over our state, expands our human understanding, too. Protecting the creative vitality of our home places is a major focus of many communities here, not just academic ones — from Las Vegas to Taos, Santa Cruz to El Valle, Chaco Canyon to White Sands, Acoma to Santa Clara, the Santuario de Chimayo to the KiMo Theatre, Gallup to Aztec, Tierra Amarilla to Mesilla, to name a few.
This intense interest of ours in honoring our unique human places is a cultural expression of the environmental sensibility that revolutionized American life in the 1960s, along with the historic preservation movement, efforts to teach and conserve indigenous languages, and to repatriate artifacts taken from sacred and ancestral sites. And many of us who care about the identity of our communities, and what they mean to us, have been the target of bitter hostility on the part of polluters, supremacists of all kinds and rude defilers ever since.
UNM’s campus matters because all expressions of a cultural devotion to place
matter. It’s about respect. And that’s as important to life as clean air and water. We all worry that places we love will be lost. As historian and horticulturalist Estavan Arellano wrote in his book “Enduring Acequias,” “It is a memory of a certain landscape that invades my dreams, tortures me when I am awake, knowing that in a generation or two this landscape will be a thing of the past.” I’m sure that what Arellano wrote about the Embudo Valley has also plagued generations of architects, historians, planners, thinkers and UNM’s major leadership over the last century who took the risk to make a truly regional campus that honored, as it best it could, all the people of our state. There was always the chance that crude indifference would make it “a thing of the past.” But as Long and Wilson admonish, let’s do everything in our power, like other lovers of place all over New Mexico, to see to it that now is not that time.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Yes, preserving architectural and artistic integrity of a place does matter, just as preserving wilderness and endangered species do. It’s about knowing who we are and honoring that uniqueness! Thank you, V. B., for this assessment and alert.
Norman Mailer called it the “architecture of totalitarianism,” relegating us to nowhere, reducing us to nobodies.
V. B. thank you, always on point.
You are right to lift-up the concerns voiced by Jim Long and Chris Wilson . It is the indifference and arrogance by those who think that what they have seen elsewhere can be shoehorned into the UNM campus.
Querencia: querencia indeed.
Thank you Señor Price.
I think the long slide into the current state actually began long ago. New Ortega was actually a charming two-story bulding between Mitchell Hall and the SUB. (I saw a model of it in 1969 in the University Architect’s office.) But then–who had not done the thorough investigation?–it was “discovered” that utility lines under the area prohibited the planned basement. So, rather than redesign the basement into somehting more attractive, tilt-up concrete panels were poured in the adjacent field and voila! the “Battleship.” The next step downward came when the policy of maximum building height was replaced with an overall average height for the campus. The partially-buried Physics lecture hall and the towering Humanities Building resulted. I could go on…
What ever happened to the role of beauty? We mourn the loss of a unique and uniquely beautiful campus. Querencia indeed!
Always enjoy your columns, V.B.
As a long-time faculty member at UNM, I am also concerned about these changes
Keep up the good work,
Beverly
Building design, as with any art form, can be of its time and still be distinct to place without being disingenuous to a historic style. Urban texture is a result of development over time which enriches the entirety of the built landscape through a dialog between past and present. There is nothing totalitarian about buildings that respond to their environment through the efficient use of current materials and technologies and that enhance the human experience through well designed space.
“Colonizer: a person who settles among and establishes political control over the indigenous people of an area.”
It is wildly arrogant and irresponsible to impose on an institution like UNM to be a monolith and a strictly rigorous entity in it’s conformance and style. To force some preconceived “campus identity” that is crafted by COLONIZERS who come from outside, who have no family history here, to then come and tell the natives what the campus identity needs to be.. that is the real crime.
There is an important place for buildings that look and feel like Zimmerman Hall or Hodgen Hall. They are cherished and they speak to a building fabric that is inherently New Mexican. There will hopefully be new buildings that reexamine these styles and once again remind us of one aspect of our cherished history.
But UNM is FLAGSHIP University. It looks to it’s past but it also looks to it’s future. It is fostering the minds of now and tomorrow. ARBITRARY mandates like this are not reflective of the optimism and metamorphosis that makes up the energy of this university. We come here to evolve. We come here to have our minds widened.. to be opened and stretched. To learn to be rigorous. We do not come to UNM to learn to CONFORM.
It sure feels like the local colonizers just want their control and their sole definition of what is “appropriate” to lead the day. They can’t help but to impose their view on us so that we may be in conformance.
An authentic New Mexican structure is built with mud and straw and wood. It looks how it looks as a function of the performance of the humble materials used. Buildings on campus are made with Steel and Concrete and stucco.
Some are made to look ‘New Mexican’ but that is only a skin. (That is ok)
But to say that the new buildings have been disrespectful to the ‘campus identity’ because they don’t fit your colonizer standard…
you are the problem.
Some of us think the future is at least as important as the past. A campus should reflect that optimism. We are the ones who have to clean up and live in the world you left us.
Sincerely,
16th Generation New Mexican
UNM Class of 2012
Hello VB, strong article. As a UNM Planner/Architect for many years, a number of issues have been painful. First of all, the stark, unfamiliar white paint. Easy to fix even without the 47 different beiges.
Another painful element is the unfamiliar modernism of most of the buildings. The “Pueblo” style was changed mostly into early modern and did not study the Pueblo’s intricate, more complex, and adventurous characteristics.
And lastly, the perception of these newer building from the streets and nearby views, is that it is now a collection of whatever. Some 30 years back, UNM was one of the 7 most admired campuses in the US for its historic and architectural unity and comprehensiveness. That’s GONE. So sorry.
And part of it is the change of the UNM Logo from a tower of Mesa Vista Hall to a “western” set of initials that could be for anything. UNM used to be the only Pueblo Revival campus in the country. They could have kept the old logo as the new seal, when they needed to replace the one with initials and the two guys with long weapons, which had nothing to do with the functions of a university.
“… administrator Jozi De Leon’s report that called for ditching the conquistador and frontiersmen, the figures some say glorify European violence against Native Americans, from the seal.”
I loved this piece! Thank you so much for it!
Colleagues,
In an effort to provide illuminating facts to opinion I have the following points regarding criticism of UNM’s Farris Engineering Center architectural design:
1. The Farris Engineering project did not, as indicated, ‘sneak in’ before the pandemic. As anyone of my fellow architects know, there is no speedy or undercover process within the development of large capital projects at the University of New Mexico. Farris Engineering project planning and programming started early in 2013 and construction was completed late in 2017. We all recognize that 2017 was more than two years before the March 2020 pandemic shutdown.
2. The Farris Engineering project involved tens of participants and hundreds of project team members. Farris Engineering project planning and programming underwent broad University scrutiny and a rigorous design process. The process included countless meetings with the University Administration and Internal User. UNM’s CDAC (Campus Development Advisory Committee) fully reviewed the project (CDAC is the University’s architectural review forum).
3. Farris Engineering, to be clear, was not a new building project but rather a renovation that reflected the Governor’s sustainability initiative, mandating a moratorium on new construction when reusable infrastructure exists. Farris was a hugely challenging renovation that transformed a brooding, dark, and dysfunctional 1960s brutalist building into an inviting, open, and light-filled state-of-the-art facility appropriate for R1 research.
4. Farris Engineering reflects both UNM’s R1 Research Institution and the University’s national status School of Engineering. The University flaunts this building in multiple university publications. It’s also a popular zoom background, not because it extends some fantasy of architecture that we no longer construct but rather because it’s genuine to its place, time and function.
5. Turning the decrepit brutalist Farris into Spanish Pueblo Revival stage set (or even a poor “post-modern” interpretation) was never, from our initial engagement in 2013, discussed and any attempt to create such a design would have been a comical failure that RMKM would not have obliged.
6. The color of Farris does not derive inspiration from the earth, but rather from another powerful context, the bright white light of the New Mexico sky.
While Farris Engineering has been criticized as “jarringly arrogant,” I would respectfully offer that the arrogance here may be asserting one’s subjective opinion and narrow perspective as fact.
I think you are missing the point. The University wants to attract new students. The old buildings some should stay but like a car they get old and need to be replaced.
Look a CalPoly SLO where I live it has one of the top architectural schools in the nation.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cal+poly+slo+buildings&t=newext&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images
Old and new. buildings not only designed to look modern but may of the new ones take advantage of nature to heat and cool the buildings.
And maybe it is cheaper to put up a new modern building because the parts of the old school are no longer around. And therefore it will cost them more money to have old designs re fabricated.
It is had to let go of the past and there are times when a thick walled adobe will far keep it’s occupants protected from the weather then a new modern glass wall with a high chimney to the heat to escape from.
We all have memories of old houses that we love to see but now they have all become bed and breakfasts.
Does any of you drive an electric car and how many of you drive a horse and buggy.
The idea is good but which will save money in the end.