DESIGN : New Yorker Can Be Thanked for Pueblo Revival

It was only by chance that John Gaw Meem, a New York City engineer-turned-banker, chose Santa Fe as the site where he would recuperate from tuberculosis in 1920.

After his doctor prescribed a sanatorium visit, Meem was walking by an Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway office when a window display featuring the picturesque landscape and adobe buildings of New Mexico caught his eye. He was persuaded to seek restored health in the desert Southwest.

No one, including the mild-mannered Meem, could have guessed the changes he would undergo during recovery. He became so enamored with the region’s indigenous building style that he trained himself as an architect and became the leading proponent of the design called Pueblo Revival.

That this Pueblo Revival style remains so recognizable is due in large part to Meem’s efforts. When he first saw Santa Fe in the 1920s, it was already in danger of losing its signature Southwest architectural appearance.

Beginning in the 1880s, rail transport had made an unlimited supply of lumber and other building materials available. The town went Victorian. By the time Meem arrived, citizen groups were just beginning to worry that their heritage of Indian-Hispanic buildings was being wiped out by the influx of Eastern designs.

In 1924, Meem, by then an architect, became prolific at designing buildings that reflected Southwest traditions.

Meem also emerged as a leader of the movement to protect Santa Fe’s historic structures, and he helped write the Santa Fe Preservation Ordinance of 1958. In the city where he found healing, Meem helped ensure the future health of the Pueblo Revival style.

This style is identified as much by the materials from which the structures are made as by its design elements. It is adobe made from New Mexico’s abundance of dry clay soil that has allowed these squat, thick, smooth structures to become the region’s defining style.

Use of adobe goes deep into the pre-Columbian past, when Native Americans erected their communal homes, called pueblos, from hand-shaped layers of clay-rich soil.

In the 1600s, Spanish colonists refined the process by making sun-dried adobe bricks from the mud. Brick-wall exteriors were protected by a thin coat of smooth mud that had to be renewed each year. American settlers added kiln-fired bricks at the top of the walls. These baked-mud bricks were harder and more resistant to pounding rains.

Architecturally, Pueblo Revival homes have nearly flat roofs with parapets, roof-supporting timbers extending through exterior walls and dense, earthy walls. The style is a mixture of influences from both flat-roofed Spanish colonial buildings and Native American pueblos.

When the style is adapted today, an adobe appearance often is mimicked by coating 12-inch frame walls with a layer of earth-tone stucco. In the best examples, the stucco is applied so that corners and roof parapets are rounded and a bit irregular, giving the walls the traditional, handmade look of adobe.