Architecture as a Functional Record: Our historic museum building and Mexican Tarascan House

Our museum galleries are housed in an historic building originally designed in 1930 as a home for public entertaining by the Director of the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe in an area originally conceived of as a site for a 38-building research complex devoted to the anthropological study of Indigenous material culture of the region, which ultimately did not materialize. Today the area is known as Museum Hill, where two State museums, two independent private museums (NMHA included), a botanical garden, and a café open to the public now operate. Throughout the development of Museum Hill over time this historic building remained a private residence until the late 1990s where the director of the School for Advanced Research lived with his family for over 30 years until it was purchased by a generous donor for the purposes of converting it to a museum for SCAS.

The Director’s Residence building is now noted with distinction on the National Register of Historic Places as an outstanding contemporary example of regional Pueblo Spanish- inspired architecture by noted New Mexican architect John Gaw Meem who, along with Isaac Hamilton Rapp and Mary Coulter, were instrumental in the definition and development of unique “Santa Fe Style” architecture. The structure was built with single and double-wide Penitentiary hollow-tile blocks, not adobe bricks, as a more permanent material that was hand-sculpted to appear to be made of earth. The building itself is accessioned into the collection and the largest piece of art owned by the Society. It is an excellent example of adaptive reuse with very little of the structure altered, maintaining the intimate character of room sizes and retaining beautifully crafted woodwork including its 1930s kitchen with original tiles and casework. It is the only residential building in Santa Fe open to the public designed by Meem.

A 6,000sf carefully sited collections and research center, attached to the historic building with an enclosed breezeway, was built at the same time as the remodel of the original building. The Society’s Permanent Collection of over 4,000 objects is housed in this wing along with its archive and library, all of which are accessible to the public for research. Students, researchers, artists, and persons with general interest in the field are encouraged to make regular use of this incredible resource that is both historic and contemporary.

A circa 1780 Colonial Mexican House from Paricutin, Michoacan, built by indigenous Tarascan people in a style introduced to Mexico from Spain, sits to the south of the building, west of the collections and research center. It is constructed of 300-pound pine planks assembled with mortise-and-tenon joinery. Its ornate corbels are an example of similar techniques brought to New Mexico and widely used by early settlers. Its Estipite columns, which appear throughout New Mexico, include a wide shaft between a narrow base and capital. The building was originally purchased in the 1950s and brought to the Denver Art Museum in the 1960s where it was housed until deaccessioned and donated to SCAS in 2001 where it was reconstructed on-site by acclaimed Santa Fe sculptor Luis Tapia and his son Sergio. Few of these houses survive in Mexico and only three known to exist in the United States.

In an interesting confluence of history, the historic building’s architect John Gaw Meem helped found the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in the 1920s independent of the Society’s ultimate ownership of the building. He and his wife, Faith Bemis Meem, contributed art to the collections that continue to be housed in the building. Their daughter, Nancy Meem Wirth, continues to be involved with the Society and its collection.