Yale School of Architecture, Fall 2022.

Supervised by Alan Plattus + Liz Galvez.

Feldman Prize 2023 Nominee

This project is a montage of artifacts, repositioning the adobe wall as a syntactical tool of resistance against palimpsests of suburban development in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The site located in Midtown Santa Fe is a unique collision of Santa Fe’s tangible and intangible histories of development. It holds memories of an arroyo, a military hospital, a rehabilitation center, a strip mall, and an arts college in its manifestation.

This has left the present realities of the Santa Fe Arts Institute, Greer Film Company, fitness center, and state office with little room. Walls, fences, and ledges act as markers for the various stages of compartmentalization and territorialization that have been exacted on the site.

The site is now itself an artifact of the palimpsest, with nature’s reclamation of the abandoned as its indication. Landscape has historically been subservient to the built, but perhaps instead the built becomes the backdrop for the natural.

Chaco Canyon and the Ancestral Puebloans who lived these lands before us still provide clues to how we should think. The wall is the final artifact of the ruin, speaking to the ground in its adobe composition.

In this proposal the adobe wall adds to vocabularies of containing with those of enclosing, embracing, guiding, leading, and revealing.

Continuous partial visibilities of the site allow for the acknowledgment of all that exists. The choreography of these moments speed you up and slow you down.

The adobe wall is an artifact - in the present a tool of active resistance against conventions of site development, and in its future as a passive celebration of the land. The new artifactual language encourages a new means of treating the land - embracing the newness of the old and the archaeology of the new.