March 2015 Green Fire Times

Sustainable New Mexico Architecture Taos Courthouse Preservation • The Old Spanish Trail

March 2015

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Vol. 7, No. 3 • March 2015 Issue No. 71 Publisher Green Fire Publishing, LLC

Skip Whitson

News & Views

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Anna C. Hansen, Dakini Design Copy Editors Stephen Klinger Susan Clair Webmaster: Karen Shepherd Contributing Writers

Stanley Crawford, Mark Henderson, Alejandro López, John M. Onstad, Rachel Preston Prinz, Seth Roffman, Bianca Sopoci-Belknap, Asha Stout

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Contents

Sustainable New Mexico Architecture . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . 7 Puebloan Architecture Spanish Colonial Architecture Architecture in the Mexican and American Territorial Periods Northern New Mexico Architecture Queen Anne and Victorian Architecture The Railroad’s Influence on New Mexico Architecture Spanish Pueblo-Revival Style Architecture Traits Taos County Courthouse Preservation Plan Moves Ahead . . .. . .. . .. . .. . 12 Taos County Courthouse Murals .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .13 How Archaeology and Architecture History Can Teach Us about Truly Sustainable Design . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .16 Cañada de Apodaca Trail Nominated to National Register as Part of Old Spanish Trail. . .. . .. . .. . 18 Nominating Sites for the National Register of Historic Places . . .. . .. . .. . .21 From the Old Spanish Trail Association Website. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . ..21 UNM-Taos: Skills Development in Sustainable Design . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .25 Book Profile: Hacking the Earthship: In Search of an Earth Shelter That Works for Everybody . . .. . .. . .. . .. 25 So Long, Big Oil and Big Coal . . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 26 What’s a Heat Pump? . . .. . .. .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 27 A Tribute to Linda Pedro: Advocate for People with Disabilities . . .. . .. . .. . 31 Sustainable Santa Fe Update. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 33 Newsbites . . .. . .. . .. . .. . ... . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 35 What’s Going On. . .. . .. . .. . . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. 38

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Intersections of Archeology, Architecture, Culture and Place

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uch of the Sustainable New Mexico Architecture focus of this edition of Green Fire Times was written by Rachel Preston Prinz, an architectural researcher and preservationist. Rachel loves to share her passion for discovering the genius loci—the “Spirit of Place.” After having been a project manager in traditional architecture firms for more than 10 years, she founded the Albuquerque-based firm Archinia, in 2007, and its nonprofit offshoot, Built for Life, in 2012. Rachel has given multiple TEDx and Pecha Kucha talks on sustainability and historic preservation and is a wellregarded designer and architectural researcher. She served as a preservation commissioner in Taos and has led groundbreaking research into traditional and modern means of earth sheltering. In 2014, she launched a television project, Built for Life, to celebrate New Mexico’s 1,000-year building tradition of no-tech sustainability.

COVER: RECONCILIACION

A mural by Emil Bisttram in the Taos County Courthouse (See page 13) Green Fire Times • March 2015

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Sustainable New Mexico Architecture

Rachel Preston Prinz

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wentieth-century architecture began to paint a different picture of New Mexican architectural values. That picture is one of architecture from other places that is unsuitable for our climate, at worst. At best, it is one that copies the architecture of our place but with total disregard for historic materials and methods that are designed to work well with our climate. This ultimately means our homes cease to work for us and are dependent on technology to function. What can we do to change that and make architecture work for the people of New Mexico again?

If it is true, as Brooke Hindle suggests, that architecture is a “three-dimensional embodiment” of history, then it is clear that the history of New Mexican architecture is a story about several distinct groups of strong and independent people, who appreciate simplicity and celebrate living. There is much we can learn from each of these periods of historic architecture to relearn the lessons our forefathers knew and put ourselves on track for a more sustainable future.

There is much we can learn from historic architecture to put ourselves on track for a more sustainable future.

The indigenous people who settled in this less-than-hospitable place knew that you chose land that was fertile, had year-round streams, and had easy access to building materials, hunting and gathering, and medicine. They kept it simple, building with materials nearly right at their feet, and orienting to the sun, so they could capture its rays in winter when heat was needed and shed the heat in summer when it was not. Like the Hispanics who settled here next, they started small and worked into larger and larger spaces as they improved their position, grew trade relationships, and gathered more tools. They shared body heat in smaller rooms and stored food in dark recesses they planned for in the center core of their homes.

They planned for securable spaces that could be naturally heated and ventilated because they were designed well.

The Hispanic settlers had an intimate knowledge and understanding of architecture and agriculture and of using microclimates to improve both. They had learned engineering from the Moors and Romans, so their approach to design was sophisticated. They built places before they built spaces, bringing in irrigation, natural ventilation, massing and construction techniques that they adapted to make spaces that were very much of their place. They adapted to each location, using science to improve performance and pure wherewithal to push through what another person might consider an impossible task—like starting an agricultural village in the desert. They realized that securing their water source in a courtyard and pairing that with solid science and shading meant that natural ventilation was improved. Shade, in the form of trellises and portals, made outdoor spaces accessible in the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Community leaders came together in these protected, south-facing, sun-basking spaces to argue positions and make decisions for the community in what would come to be known as the resolana.

Taos Pueblo

As early as 700 A.D., the area we now know as New Mexico was settled by indigenous people who were morphing their lifestyles from a nomadic hunting and gathering existence to a stable agricultural one. They began to build permanent structures, including pit houses, cliff dwellings and pyramid-shaped pueblos.

These structures were almost purely functional, providing protection from the elements and natural enemies, as well as places to store a growing collection of farming implements. In historic documents, this period of architecture is called Indian Style. Today, however, the architectural forms from this early indigenous settlement are referred to as Pueblo style.

The Puebloans mastered working with their environment, utilizing every advantage they could to live comfortably.

One of many interesting aspects of indigenous architecture in New Mexico is that Puebloan peoples will sometimes allow a building to die. They believe that, as in life, everything has a season, and sometimes that season ends.

Puebloan buildings are built close to the mountains, in most cases, where trees for roof framing are easily accessible. Also, there is year-round running water on the site.

Traditional Pueblo style architecture is characterized by materials that reflect and respond to their place. Structures were most often constructed of puddled adobe (poured like concrete), sun-dried adobe, or stacked stone that was collected or shaped on-site. Floors were usually dirt. These buildings are often two or more stories tall, oriented with their main façade facing south or southeast and stepped continued on page 8

© Rachel Preston Prinz (2)

The Americans brought with them the tools and materials to change the way we built to adapt even more to our particular climate. Pitched roofs and milled details allowed us to capture the sun for solar gain, and bigger operable windows allowed more light and ventilation into spaces. When we added full-length porches, we found out we could precool the air before it entered the home.

When all of these ideas were merged, we got architecture that stands the test of time.

Puebloan Architecture

Now, that is sustainable! And it is all within our reach, if we do what we can on our own, then come together with our communities and share with our children how it is all connected—and how we are all connected.

Acoma Pueblo

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Sustainable NM

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back on upper levels to facilitate passive solar collection and good views for feast dances. The earth-colored walls are covered in mud stucco as a kind of chinking, like that used in log homes to prevent air infiltration. The mud plaster was repaired or replaced annually.

The smallish interior spaces of Puebloan buildings were directly based on the lengths of locally available vigas, which, in northern New Mexico, means spaces about 15 feet wide. Historic interiors were decorated with yeso—painted white with natural gypsums—and may have featured rodestrado—darker, earth-tone, contrast-color paint or manta fabric at the wainscot (lower wall facing) commonly used in later times. If the former decorative technique was used outside, it used bright, vegetable-based dyes. Many rooms had a corner fire pit with a skylight above it. This encouraged a physical reaction in the way air moved through the space, allowing for a natural heating and cooling method—called stack effect— that drew heat from the fireplaces, which were connected on several levels. Rooms were sometimes exhausted via chimney pots, a later addition we can see notably at Acoma Pueblo.

Door and window openings were often low and small, with rough-hewn wood lintels, and rarely located on ground level. Rather, the house was accessed by climbing a ladder to upper floors, then descending another ladder. The crude branch ladders were constructed with rawhide thongs or notched tree trunks. Doorways were often closed with hide or coarse cloth, and windows covered with selenite, mica or oiled hide before wooden doors and glazed windows were introduced in the 19th century.

The Puebloans mastered working with their environment, utilizing every advantage they could find to live comfortably, long before the Europeans arrived. They knew and understood the landscape, its climate, the ebbs and flows of the seasons and, thus, the movements of water, plants and animals. They built from things they could find on the site or directly adjacent to it. They built for longevity and built community around the work of keeping their homes maintained. There is much for us to learn from this if we want to start building lives that are truly Sustainable.

If the world were to fall into complete disarray, if all our mechanical systems were to fail and our transportation systems were to break, we could be in real trouble.

The Puebloan people who are maintaining a significant degree of their traditional ways would have all they need as far as food, shelter and water right where they are. They would be just fine.

Spanish Colonial Architecture

In 1540, 67 years before the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, and 80 years prior to the landing at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, the Spanish explorer Coronado was exploring what would become New Mexico, claiming the area and its inhabitants for the Spanish Crown. With him, and in subsequent expeditions into the frontier, came Franciscan friars, whose charge was to lead as many of the “natives” as possible into the service of the church, were also asked to guide a

© Seth Roffman

The roofs and floors between levels were supported by random-length, peeled-log vigas supporting aspen latillas, willow twigs, split cedar or pine, which was then laid over with grasses or straw and, finally, adobe mud, dirt, or sod/turf.

Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe

number of settlers to build a new empire by harvesting the efforts of the people and the bounty of the land. The land was not as giving as Coronado might have hoped, and Spanish settlement had created friction between the tribes. Because harvests were given to the church and king, there was no food to trade. Starving and enslaved, the native people wanted no more of Spanish rule. They revolted in 1680. After the Pueblo Revolt, the Palacio Real, or Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe, was turned into and lived in as a pueblo for 13 years until Diego de Vargas returned in 1693 to implement the Reconquest.

The Spanish Crown had rules for the size and shape of all elements of common buildings.

The architecture of the time was fortified and was designed only to provide shelter.

Any structures that were built were supplied by either what could be obtained in the immediate vicinity or on the biannual wagon trains that arrived from Chihuahua, México, on the Santa Fe Trail. Unlike the architecture of California or Texas, there wasn’t the money in New Mexico for elaborate Mission-style churches and homes.

There was no police force, little ruling authority and, for many years, nowhere near enough clergy to tend to the needs of the people. New Mexican settlers had to fend for themselves, leading to the evolution of the Penitentes and another major Hispanic contribution to New Mexican culture: artifacts for homes, including beautiful hand-crafted santos, bultos and retablos. By all accounts, New Mexico was still very much a frontier. From the mid-17th century through the late 19th century, the predominant architectural style was referred to as Spanish Colonial.

The early Hispanic period buildings, in most cases, started with only one or two rooms. They were added onto as families grew, until they formed courtyard homes called haciendas. The hacienda was the ideal form for its day, built surrounding a patio, with a portal all around or across one end of the enclosed courtyard. The hacienda had small exterior openings, so the space could be secured from animal and human predators, which also led to somewhat of an interior focus. The zaguan, a covered room on the outside wall of the courtyard home, had a large gate on the outside face and an opening into the courtyard at the inside. This allowed people to bring in their livestock and wagons in case of attack.

© Rachel Preston Prinz

The Spanish Crown had rules for size and shape of many elements of common buildings.

South-facing hillsides were preferred for building locations to protect buildings from the north and west winds and snow, to maximize solar gain in winter, and to offer a secure, high vantage point from which to defend the buildings.

The Trujillo home on Ranchitos Road in Taos

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In most cases, buildings were

continued on page 10

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Sustainable NM

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constructed of thick courses of sun-dried adobe bricks, a technique the Spanish learned from the Moors.

© Anna C. Hansen

Buildings were constructed as one-story structures, with rooms linked together linearly and opening either into one another along one side or through a covered porch. Most had short parapet walls at the joint of the roof and walls to prevent people from climbing onto the roof, as well as to give defenders a place from which to shoot during an attack. The mud-plaster exterior walls were remudded each year in an enjarre, which was almost always done by women. Most homes featured bee hive-shaped, raised corner fireplaces with adobe chimneys. These Spanish Colonial buildings most often utilized a low-pitched or flat earthen roof supported by round, peeled vigas and latillas and, eventually, planks, which were sometimes painted or covered with bleached muslin. Better tools made of metal—not stone—made possible refined cutting of vigas, and these were eventually cut into rectangular shapes and allowed to rest on large carved brackets, which allowed for longer spans and taller, larger spaces. The Spanish preferred one large, multifunction space to the many smaller, single-use spaces that the Native Americans preferred.

Taos Territorial House, ca. 1875. Listed in the National Register of Historical Places

From the transfer of what would become New Mexico from Spain into Mexican hands in 1821, to the American occupation in 1846, commerce and social development were centered at the regional trading posts, where money, goods and ideas were exchanged.

South-facing hillsides protected buildings from the winds and snow, and maximized solar gain in winter.

As indigenous raids were quelled, people began to move to the areas just outside of the town proper and build their homes around small placitas. You can see this influence today while strolling the Taos shopping district on Paseo del Pueblo Norte, as well as in the neighborhoods behind and around La Loma Plaza. In fact, the Taos Inn is one such grouping of homes around a small plaza, only the homes are now combined into one building, and its courtyard has been enclosed to form a space for a bar and lounge, complete with corner fireplace. The original well sits inside, covered up by a sculptural fountain and skylight.

Interior walls were whitewashed, in most cases, to reflect light from the small windows through the space and featured a gingham or similar fabric wainscot.

Elaborately carved woods and colorful paint detailing at ceilings, arches, between rooms or over doorways were usually reserved for the interior of the building for maintenance reasons. The earthen floors were pounded with adobe mortar and, eventually, planed wood. Many were covered with a locally made jerga, a blackand-white geometric cloth carpet.

In the eastern United States, Greek Revival architecture was in very much in vogue at the time. While the rest of America was dancing to the beat of Grecian drums, it was not until the opening of Fort Union’s new officers’ quarters in 1869 and

The small windows we see in Spanish Colonial period buildings might have originally been made of selenite, mica or oiled hides. They were sometimes covered with wooden shutters, which allowed the rooms to hold heat in at night. Wooden grilles over openings mimic Spanish metal grilles and allow for ample natural ventilation. With tools came the ability to make things, and two of the most important items made during this period were doors and hinges. Metalworking of iron and tin was introduced, and we see these details used first in churches and, later, in private homes. Glass and cloth were also being traded on the wagon trains from México, and we start to see beautiful detailed embroidery with bird and floral designs on altar cloths, walls and glass. Those symbols were derived from Oriental, Persian and Moorish motifs.

The Spanish used the same basic principles of good design that the Puebloans did, and they introduced tools, natural ventilation and decorating techniques that made their larger spaces shine.

When the Santa Fe Trail opened in 1821, New Mexican architecture began to change. Still considered a wild and primitive place, New Mexico was growing and evolving, and architecture began to reflect its “civilization.” In 1815, French and American fur traders arrived in Taos, which would become the southwest gateway to the ports of trade in the central and western states.

These hunters and trappers fared well Taos Plaza in the late 1800s in the unruly town that Taos was and amassed their wealth and power in several homes along Ledoux Street. Gardens burst to overflowing with flowers in the summer.

Courtesy of Denver Public Library

Architecture in the Mexican and American Territorial Periods

Fort Marcy’s construction in 1870 that Greek Revival took a firm hold in New Mexico.

The introduction of American forces was intended to quell tensions between the many Two examples of Territorial style in Santa Fe people claiming New Mexican lands and, of course, to protect the Santa Fe Trail, which provided both a financial incentive and supply support for U.S. expansion into the frontier. With the arrival of the U.S. Army came access to a much higher degree of skilled workmanship, as well as the most significant intervention for New Mexican architectural design prior to the railroads, that is, sawmills, which allowed for much finer detailed trim and carpentry. The second and third most significant donations to New Mexico’s architectural development were nails and window glass. Taos had structures influenced by both Greek Revival and Colonial Revival on its plaza before the plaza burned down in sections over the 1920s and 1930s.

It was not uncommon for Greek Revival-influenced homes to use the concept of a separated front and back parlor, usually one large rectangular room separated by a structural wall and some curtains, so we look for this hallmark in renovated buildings to determine their period of construction. continued on page 28

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Taos County Courthouse Preservation Plan Moves Ahead

Rachel Preston Prinz

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o preserve the historic Taos County Courthouse on Taos Plaza, the town of Taos and Taos County have come together to address long-standing issues regarding maintenance and use of the facility, which has been all but abandoned since municipal offices were moved from the building in the late 1960s. Since that time, the building has served various functions, including as a home base for some of the plaza’s merchants. However, underutilization of the facility and the dwindling budgets that resulted left the building in need of some relatively serious upgrades in order to make it functional, financially viable and accessible to meet modern codes.

To address these concerns,Taos architect David Henry was contracted in 2014 to put together a team to prepare a preservation plan. The plan outline asked the team to consider the building’s historic and current uses, determine structural and architectural stability and propose future phases for stabilization and rehabilitation, so that the structure could be put back into sustainable use.

The Spanish Pueblo Revival courthouse we see today is the third documented municipal structure on the site.

Henry, historic structural engineer Jim Hands of Santa Fe and I used the architectural and art-history pieces of this report as a basis to determine the architectural chronology of the building. One of the greatest finds was locating the original architect’s drawings on vellum and mylar at UNM’s Center for Southwest Research at the Zimmerman Library in Albuquerque.This seemed like a miracle because many of the county’s records were destroyed in the fire that claimed the courthouse’s predecessor building, and many later records were lost in moves to other locations.

The 1932 Spanish Pueblo Revival courthouse we see today is the third documented iteration of a municipal structure on the site. The first dated to sometime between 1830 and 1842 and is identified on an 1847 map of the town square as a calaboza, or jail, in the Galician dialect from northern Spain. The building on that map appears to have been a small, one-room-deep building. We can safely presume that it was completed in Hispanic vernacular style with adobe construction and vigas serving as the structure for a flat earthen roof because other materials would have been prohibitively difficult to obtain in this far-removed northern outpost in the Mexican territory. We know that a second iteration of the Taos Plaza 1880 courthouse was completed in the American Territorial period, sometime around 1880, once the Americans arrived and began the process of morphing New Mexico into a U.S. state. This Americanized courthouse was also one room deep, but it appears to have been somewhat wider at the façade than its predecessor. It was also most likely made of adobe but featured uniquely American details like wood trim at the doors and windows, which were introduced when the American government built the first wood Taos Plaza 1902 mills to support the building of facilities like Fort Union.This second-generation courthouse had a detached jail behind the building, across a small yard that featured a hand-dug well.The structure was modernized several times, removing the high parapets and adding a pitched roof, then adding a gable to shed water away from the front door. This courthouse never had a portal.

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The second Territorial generation of the Taos County Courthouse, along with most of the buildings on the north side of the plaza, burned nearly to the ground on May 9, 1932. The several fires that destroyed Taos Plaza in the early 20th century were most likely due to a combination of the Americanization of the plaza, which covered the historic adobe structures with wood façades, along with the introduction of lessthan-ideally designed and installed electrical systems. Between 1912–1918 the east side of the plaza burned. The Columbia Hotel, predecessor to the La Fonda Hotel we see today on the south side of the plaza, burned in 1928. The west side of the plaza burned down in 1931. The courthouse and north sideburning down in 1932 was the final blow. Thankfully, by the early 20th century, most of the residents had moved away from the plaza, so, while businesses sustained major losses, loss of life was minimized.

Because of these fires, most buildings on the plaza had been replaced, so much of the “truly historic” ambience of our past was lost. Original 30-inch adobe walls from the old plaza buildings still exist, embedded in walls on the outer edges of the area, offering our only tangible glimpses into the plaza that once was.

When the second iteration of the courthouse burned in 1932, it was decided to rebuild the courthouse in its same location but with a greatly expanded footprint to allow more of the county’s services to be accessible in one place. Along with the rest of the buildings that were replaced on the plaza, the new building would be built in the new Spanish Pueblo Revival style that John Gaw Meem and others were utilizing to “modernize” Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Louis Hesselden, an Albuquerque architect, was called in to design the new structure. Hesselden was the son of a renowned Albuquerque designer and mason and would ultimately become one of Albuquerque’s most prolific architects, designing the famous Nob Hill Business Center—the first automobile shopping center in the world—as well as the Excelsior Laundry Building, College of St. Joseph Campus (University of Albuquerque), St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, First Methodist Church, Albuquerque Country Club, some of the structures of the New Mexico State Fair, countless residences and, eventually, the Bernalillo County Courthouse and Hall of Justice that would replace the one his own continued on page 14

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Courtesy New Mexico State Records and Archives Center

Top (l-r): Emil Bisttram’s Reconciliation/Reconciliación, Bert Philips’ The Shadow of Crime/La Sombra del Crimen, Ward Lockwood’s Sufficient Law Protects/Ley Suficiente Protege; Center: Ward Lockwood’s Justice Begets Content/Justicia Causa Felicidad, Frederico Vigil’s Respect Creates Harmony/Armonia Trae Respeto; Bottom: Victor Higgins’s Moses the Law Giver/Moises El Legislador

Above: Taos Court House frescoes under construction. L-R: Ward Lockwood with his Superfluous Laws Oppress; Public Works of Art Project regional coordinator Gustave Baumann; Bert Phillips with his The Shadow of Crime; and assistant Amarante Maes. 1934.

Taos County Courthouse Murals

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hen the new Taos County Courthouse was completed in January 1934, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Public Works of Art Project commissioned four of Taos’s premier artists to paint 10 murals in the facility.

The project was managed by Santa Fe artist Gustave Baumann. The four artists engaged in the effort were Emil Bisttram, Ward Lockwood, Bert Phillips and Victor Higgins. They became known as the “Taos Fresco Quartet.” An 11th mural was completed in 1994 by renowned New Mexican fresco artist Frederico Vigil following his conservation of the original murals. i

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Taos County Courthouse continued from page 12

The 1932 courthouse was built with partial funding from the Public Works Administration and partly financed by a loan from a local bank. Construction was started in 1932 by contractor L. H. Bovos. The courthouse was completed and inhabited by January 1934. The facility included offices for county staff, including the sheriff, county clerk and assessor, commissioner, treasurer, two vaults and jail on the first floor, and the agriculture agent, superintendent of schools, district judge, justice of the peace, district attorney and the court and jury rooms on the second floor.The move into the courthouse was facilitated by “trucks, vans, lorries and wagons,” according to a report by 23-year veteran Taos News arts editor Regina Tatum Cooke, who crafted a wood-block print of the move-in for the front page of the paper on the day the facility opened.

© Rachel Preston Prinz

father had built. He was a vanguard of the new architecture of the time and perfectly suited for designing a municipal facility. His characteristic design style was noted to have several common characteristics: the use of cementitious stucco, brick and cast stone as decorative detailing (evoking Spanish Colonial Revival and Territorial Revival styles) and details influenced by Mediterranean and California Mission Revival styles.

This helps to explain the interesting mission detailing at the Taos County Courthouse.

Taos County Courthouse, 2010

After the building was vacated by Taos County government in 1970, minimal funds and maintenance were provided by the county.

Reports of roof leaks, damaged adobe, ruined plaster, cracking and chipping of the ceilings and walls and damage from break-ins became more common, until the facility was finally stabilized and the roof repaired in the 1990s.Those repairs are more than 20 years old now and, because of a lack of maintenance funding, many of these issues need to be readdressed.

The character-defining features of the historic Taos County Courthouse remain intact: • Its location on Taos Plaza, serving as a courthouse square, South façade of courthouse, Dec. 1941 which reflects the enduring Spanish influence of town planning; In 2010, the town of Taos received a $125,000 federal grant through the American • The two-story flat-roofed, stuccoed adobe building with its curvilinear parapet, Recovery and Reinvestment Act to upgrade the mechanical systems in the building. exposed vigas and punched windows, characteristic of Spanish Pueblo Revival The funds were used to design and install a modern gas-fired, hot-water, radiant-heating style; system to replace the aging and failing steam boiler and radiator system. So, while the • Original windows in some places; building remains largely empty, it has “good bones.”

• The portal extends across the entire south façade and is detailed with exposed Most of the building’s current issues revolve around its underutilization; addressing round vigas and wood decking, 10-inch-by-10-inch wood support beams, 12-inchdeferred maintenance—which threatens the portal, roof and adobe walls; and addressing diameter round posts and carved-wood corbels. The portal originally terminated the less-than-ideally detailed infills at the east and west alley additions, which have on the east and west ends with massive stucco rooms that led to open alleyways caused structural damage and eliminated access to natural light and ventilation. Other on the east and west sides of the building but is otherwise intact; major factors in restoring the courthouse to full use include the building’s current state, • The original central hallway plan with the primary entrance centered on the south which does not meet code for fire protection, egress, or restroom facilities, and it does not façade; provide equal access under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).To achieve these • The interior, with simple, unadorned finishes in all rooms but the main stair, which ends, a sprinkler system must be installed, fire-protecting materials should be added at features geometric railings typical of the period, and the courtroom, now known the corridors, restrooms should be added, and a handicapped-accessible lift or elevator as the Mural Room, features 10 original WPA-era murals by four of the members should be installed to allow visitors of every ability to visit the historic mural room. of Taos’ famous Society of Artists.

The building was not perfect in its original design, and some modifications were required to address issues in the original construction. We know that part of the back wall was built of adobe, but it was located in-grade, meaning that the elevation of the ground at the north side of the building is nearly a story above that at the south.The original walls at this location needed to be reinforced with concrete to address issues from retaining this massive wall of earth. Structural loading on the floors of the courthouse and the rest of the second floor led to issues of sound transmission to the floors below. Carpet and dropped ceilings were added to attempt to dampen the sound. These approaches were not entirely successful and will likely need to be addressed in the future.

The character-defining features of the historic courthouse remain intact The only major changes to the exterior of the building over its 80-plus years of existence are the infill of the east and west alleys on either side of the main structure and the removal and replacement of the massive adobe “bookends” on the portal, both of which appear to have been done within a few years of the original construction.The replacement of the double-hung windows with single-pane fixed windows and the replacement of the original wooden entrance door, transom and sidelights are somewhat major changes to the character of the building that might need to be reconsidered. Other changes have shifted uses of spaces and wall locations on the interior but, for the most part, are benign and easy to work around in a revised use plan.

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At recent public meetings to generate interest in the project, it was shared that the approximate cost of addressing all of these issues and getting the building completely ready for its next iteration will be around $2.5 million. A first phase of updating the interior first-floor spaces, providing an elevator and adding restrooms, has been estimated at a little over $800,000. The remainder of the upgrades and repairs has been estimated at approximately $1.5 million.The county, town and interested organizations are currently enlisting public support for the project, as well as looking into ways of creatively and collaboratively funding the restoration of this important piece of Taos’ history. Future public meetings and design charrettes will explore the potential uses of the space.

David Henry notes that “The Historic Taos County Courthouse served its constituents well for the 35+ years of its public life. Unfortunately, as Taos County grew (and continues to grow) the staff, agencies and the public needed more space and more parking. The decision to relocate the courthouse off of the plaza in +/-1970 had far-reaching and unforeseen ramifications. Once the public functions were taken out of the historic building, daily life on the historic Taos Plaza was changed forever. Citizens no longer linger in the shade of the plaza portal after they have filed their marriage license or paid their property taxes. Now these activities take place in a much larger facility with modern paved parking, air-conditioned hallways, and pass-codeprotected access to Taos County staff. A sign of the times. Some may call this progress. Yet, the way the historic plaza structure was used back in the day will never be reproduced at the modern facility. Maybe the pace of life is just a little too quick now. I know that many people miss the park-like setting of the historic plaza and the ability to undertake civic activities, social hour, and lunch with friends, all within the walkable and comfortable confines of the plaza.” i

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Green Fire Times • March 2015

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How Archaeology and Architecture History Can Teach Us about Truly Sustainable Design

Rachel Preston Prinz

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hen this photo was taken 18 years ago, I had no idea how prophetic it would become. I was traveling to Europe’s mysterious ruined places, like Paestum and Pompeii, and fell in love—with the bones of architecture. I would marvel over details like this elaborately laid column.

That was the beginning of a career where I would get to play on the edge that separates architecture and archaeology. I figure out the puzzles, patterns and underlying systems that made old architecture work and then apply that knowledge to modern design. I will share with you some of the things I have learned that I think can help you make your space work better for you.

One of the things I have puzzled over the most is this stuff called “green,” like this award-winning “green” gas station. It has no place.

It could be anywhere. It is made of lots of metal. That metal had to be mined, transported and brought to an extraordinarily high temperature to be workable, using huge amounts of resources through every step in the process. All those surfaces have no point but decoration and require an unbelievable number of connections.

What the past tells us about green design is that it is local, simple, natural and efficient. The majority of things we do today to make ourselves feel green actually are not. Double-thick walls mean double the wood. Rigid board insulation is made from petroleum. And the super-insulated home idea often means windows you cannot open windows because air is delivered to you via a power-driven system.

Besides the fact that New Mexico is ideal for open windows nearly six months a year, design based on power-driven systems is just not smart. Because, as we learned with the Super Bowl freeze a few years back, the sun goes down, storms pop up, and power and gas go down. And then what?

Truly sustainable buildings have to work at a suitable baseline without depending on mechanical systems to function. The mechanical system has to be an accessory, not the primary source of heat, water or air. Guided by 5,000 years of documented building history, here is how I know this idea can work.

On the chart below we see the far left is when we started building structures for permanent habitation. Stonehenge happened not long after that. The founding of

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Rome, in about 700 B.C.E., happened a little over halfway along our timeline. The last quarter or so of the line shows when we built Gothic cathedrals, and people in the Southwest moved into cliff houses some 100 years later. It was not for another 600 years that we introduced any kind of mechanical system to try and control our environment.

Of our entire building history, we have had mechanical systems for less than 4 percent of that time, meaning that, for 96 percent of our time, our buildings worked with the environment, instead of despite it.

Understanding this was the first part of my paradigm shift. Then, one day, I was hanging over the edge of a ruin taking this photo of a kiva/pit house in Chaco Canyon: Precariously balanced, I was trying to get the shot right, and I had one of those ahha moments. I saw that the same levels of the kiva/pit house are the skeleton—the bones—of this Navajo-inspired Moon Lodge, in Taos, where my girlfriends and I met for women’s group once a month.

It’s super comfortable and warm, has great light and feels like “home.”

I finally got it. By looking at archaeology as an applied science, instead of just a recording of history, we can take lessons from the old ways to make the new work better. We can look at what lessons our region has to offer us in archaeological building. The first lesson was from my ah-ha moment. Earth shelters work.

Have you been to Mesa Verde or Bandelier and climbed down into a kiva on a hot summer day? The kiva is at least 20 degrees cooler than outside and, in winter, it can be 20 degrees warmer. And it can be warmed even more with just a small fire.

And we were not alone. Just about every culture in every time period around the world utilized earth-sheltering techniques. From the Jomon houses in Japan to Viking pit houses in Denmark to the Vaodong complexes in China to the troglodyte complexes in Guadix, Spain.

And even to the Hotel Sidi Driss, designed as a traditional, Berber troglodyte underground building in Matmata, Tunisia.

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Do you recogniz e that building? Does it look familiar? You have probably seen it, but it might have been a while. It is the Skywalker family home from Star Wars!

Yep, it is a real place in Tunisia.

If Luke Skywalker can live in a “primitive” earth shelter and still drive a spaceship and save the galaxy, then what is stopping us from doing that?

I am only half-way joking.

The lesson is twofold: study and learn from the past, and apply the lessons.

This is a modern pit house— the Black Pyramid House in Saijo, Japan, designed

by Suppose Design Office.

There is nothing “granola” about this pit house; it is sleek and modern and full of light. Imagine what we could do if we married these old building ideas with the new forms our great local architects and designers are using today.

© Seth Roffman

Another lesson that New Mexico archaeology can teach us about building is about adobe; it’s just a handful of mud and a dash of clay, some water and straw, and add some sunshine and you have a variation on sun-dried mud brick made first in Mesopotamia some 4,000 years ago. First, we plastered our pit houses with mud; then, we figured out we could pour it in lifts and make walls. Later, we started massproducing adobe bricks.

Today, we can google “adobe and stone structures” and find examples from around the world that show new ways of building—ways that other cultures finessed for their place and time.

We can take a El Rancho de las Golandrinas, La Ciénega little of this good idea and a little of that good idea and put them together in new ways that reflect our values and our access to information. New Mexico has evolved. We can invent new architectures, based on traditional buildings, and honor the past by leaving it intact.

The hacienda—a courtyard house—was a gift to us from the Spanish, who got the idea from the Moors, who got it from the Romans, who got it from the Egyptians, who got it from the Mesopotamians. It was an idea that was used everywhere. Courtyard houses are great because they are easy to build; you can start with one room and build new rooms as your family grows until you enclose the central space. The wraparound portals are cool in summer and will keep your boots dry in the winter. The courtyard, with its trees and wells, is a form of natural evaporative air-conditioning.

The Hispanic settlers who built these spaces knew they were creating an ecosystem and building microclimates to help facilitate living and working in the less-thanhospitable desert. That is why the first thing built in an area was the acequia system.

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It was not just about growing food. It was about creating a place to live that worked for the people.

And, again, we can learn from the past and embrace change along the way.

A hacienda

This is a modern courtyard house in a high-rise designed by Korean architects IROJE KHM. The tiny courtyard is a lightwell. Another designer—like me—might install flower boxes and planters into the edges of the space to grow fruits and veggies, or they might have a roof catchment and collect water and then use aquaponics to clean the water and grow veggies. Really, there are all kinds of ways to make this small space a green asset.

There is another lesson we can learn from our past, too.

Old New Mexico buildings used earth roofs. Builders worked, although sometimes they would leak and grow weeds. They did not realize then that they could harness that. But in other places around the world, they did and still do. Today, green roofs are a staple of great green design. They can take many different forms, depending on where they are. They can be modern or ancient. They can even be colorful, depending on the climate you live in. In New Mexico, we have learned how to make modern versions work for us, too.

What the past tells us about green design is that it is local, simple, natural and efficient.

The reality is, we can have truly green design without technology. We can honor our roots without only copying the old. And, if we choose to, we can find a way of being that we can honestly call sustainable.

If you would like to figure out one thing you can do today to use old ideas to improve your own space, go out and get five healthy deciduous trees, as large as you can afford.

If they are native heirloom fruit trees, that’s even better. Plant them far enough away from the south and west corner of your building so the roots will not bother the foundations when they are fully grown. Love them, water them, sit with them, watch them grow, harvest their fruit and see what happens. I bet you will love the difference you feel. And when it comes time to pay the bills, your pocketbook will love the change, too.

If you would like to see more archaeologically inspired architecture, please check out the Archinia Pinterest board we created for this project, titled Archaeo-Architecture a t h t t p s : / / w w w. pinterest.com/ archinia/archaeo -architecture/ i

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Cañada de Apodaca Trail Nominated to the National Register as part of the Old Spanish Trail

Rachel Preston Prinz and Mark Henderson

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n a nondescript drainage on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land just west of Dixon, one of northern New Mexico’s stories comes to life in a landscape that has changed little since indigenous people used these pathways as far back as 600 years ago to move between the pueblos of Picuris and Taos and points further. This is the story of the Cañada de Apodaca, a historic trail recommended for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing intact segment of the Old Spanish National Historical Trail (OST). Cañada de Apodaca is one of two routes into Taos on the 70mile commercial-goods pack trail and livestock driveway that connected the Mexican territorial center in Santa Fe to the wool production and weaving industry in the Spanish Colonial towns in the Española Valley, to the agrarian plazuelas in the Taos Valley, and on to other markets in Nuevo México and beyond, during the Spanish Colonial, Mexican Territorial and early U.S. Territorial periods.

The landscape remains largely intact and shares the same amazing vistas witnessed by the first European settlers.

Prior to being used as a formal trail between Santa Fe and Taos, the only trail to or from Taos was a network of prehistoric aboriginal footpaths along the Río Grande. The more formalized

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trail of the Hispanic settlers followed those paths and then turned slightly eastward to avoid the fragoso, or rugged, Río Grande Gorge (La Caja del Río) and the gorge’s embudo, or funnel/ chokepoint. Just outside Dixon, the trail split into two routes. The High Road, known as the Camino Alto or summer route, is the same route that visitors taking the High Road to Taos enjoy today. This passes through the Colonial settlements of Chimayó, Truchas, Ojo Sarco, Las Trampas, Chamisal and Picuris Pueblo. The 3-mile-long Cañada de Apodaca National Historical Trail occurs on the Low Road alignment, the Camino Abajo or winter route.

The natural drainage is associated with the North Branch of the Old Spanish National Historical Trail and was heavily used between 1829 and 1848 as a pack trail from Taos on New Mexico’s northeastern frontier with the United States.

Historic documents offer us a glimpse into life along the route both before and after the Mexican period. One of the first known records of travel on the route between the Española Valley and the Taos Plateau was made as part of DeVargas’ reconquest expedition of 1694, where De Vargas and his cadre apparently traveled to Taos via Picuris on the High Road.

Historic trails are as much a concept as a reality. Many factors dictated regular shifts in the path of travel. Where in one season a user might traverse the path in a certain manner, a flooding

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Picuris Range and the Río Grande Gorge. The trail travels north from the Española Valley, where the Río Grande emerges from the gorge to flow through soft pinkish sediments of the Tesuque Formation, through the community of Embudo. Here, the trail parallels Highway 68 up the Rito Cieneguilla to the Río Vista hill, with its commanding view of the Llano de Taos, or Taos Valley, an expansive plain formed from 3- to 5-millionyear-old basalt lava flows. The upper part of the Apodaca Trail trace, called the Spur Ridge, is currently one of the few identified segments of intact historic pack trail that has not been substantially altered by later wheeledvehicle use or grade construction on the entire OST. A number of natural landmarks and features are visible from the trail. At the entrance to the Cañada to the south

© Rachel Preston Prinz (2)

Looking back toward Apodaca

stream, a fallen boulder, or an unknown visitor sharing the road might cause the user to adjust the path accordingly. So, what we know of today as a trail, when all the routes are mapped, looks more like a corridor of interwoven paths along a general way. We can see this illustrated in historic documents. In 1705, Roque Madrid was ordered by interim New Mexico Gov. Francisco Cuervo y Valdez to lead a military expedition against the Navajos. Madrid led a force of 100 soldiers and militia with 300 pueblo auxiliaries into the contemporary core of Eastern Navajo territory. Madrid’s account infers that Picuris Pueblo and Taos Pueblo are the gateway settlements of the northern frontier, and he discusses in some detail the challenges of utilizing a small and rugged pack trail for moving a large force of men. He had to adapt to the conditions of the path.

Looking west toward the Gorge

In 1776, Friar Francisco Atanasio Domínguez conducted an inspection of the Catholic missions of New Mexico, including those at Taos and Picuris. He wrote specifically about each of the two routes to Taos in his account, reporting that the “best highway leads through” the “Cañada de Apodaca.” In 1779, Gov. Anza returned from the campaign against the Comanche via the Camino Real to Embudo along the same wellused pack trail.

The Cañada de Apodaca Trail negotiates a drainage between the

are Cerro de Arriba and Cerro Abajo, upper and lower hills, respectively, with Mesa de la Cejita, a dark-colored volcanic basalt-capped mesa beyond.

Around the corner of the upper and lower hills, just beyond view, is a natural pillar from the Santa Fe Formation, which was used as a landmark for travelers to know they were on the right path. To the southwest is the distinctive flat-topped Pedernal. To the west are a cluster of hills known as Cerro Azul and the three-pinnacled hill Tres Orejas, both of which emerge from the continued on page 20

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volcanic tablelands of the Taos Plateau.

Looking slightly southwards, the traveler sees the Jémez Mountains, the volcanic peaks on the north margin of the Valles Caldera. To the northwest, the ridge of the Tusas Range, and towards the east, Picuris Peak comes into view at the crest of the historic trail. To the southeast are Trampas Peak and the Truchas Peaks, the second-highest peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Range.

The complicated topography of the Cañada de Apodaca illuminates the isolated frontier outpost landscape at the Taos trade center in the early historic period around the 1600s. Taos emerged as the information center of northern New Mexico, where knowledgeable guides could be engaged to navigate the complex networks of trails from New Mexico to California, which most often passed through vastly varied and often extremely complicated terrain. These guides were often able to help travelers to connect with—or avoid—the different indigenous peoples encountered along the way.

The Cañada de Apodaca Trail was known as a particularly difficult obstacle between Taos on the northern frontier and the core settlements and governmental administration at Santa Fe in the Mexican Territorial period in the 19th century. By this time, the Española Valley had become the most populous settled region in Mexican Territorial New Mexico, and it developed homespun workshops of exportable goods, or efectos de país, including woolen woven outer garments called serapes and woven blankets for bedding called fresadas.

The trail passes through vastly varied and often extremely complicated terrain

Meanwhile,Taos continued to transition as a center of commercial activity in the Santa Fe trade, based on the activities of trappers and Indian traders like the iconic Kit Carson and the lesser-known Antoine Robidoux. Information and isolation were critical pieces of the puzzle in answering why people would make Taos a central place in commerce.The use of the Taos route was probably less about transporting woven goods to California than it was about Taos being the source of knowledgeable guides, scouts and traders

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who had geographic knowledge required by the merchants and packers, or arrieros, that were transporting already-procured woven woolen goods to California and herding thousands of mares from California for breeding stock to produce Missouri mules.

By 1821, when México declared independence from Spain, the frontier trade center and commercial functions at Taos Pueblo were being supplanted by commercial trapping, particularly for beaver pelts harvested from the Great Basin by Spanish-, English- and French-speaking entrepreneurs and guides based in the agrarian settlements in the Taos Valley. Traveling the trail was part of doing business. By the American Territorial period, the pre-Colombian aboriginal network of footpaths had been reorganized to accommodate pack animals—mules, horses and donkeys— for transport of commercial items.

Charles Bent, Kit Carson, Antoine Robidoux, William Wolfskill, Isaac Slover and William Workman all built on the business- and family-friendly policies of the Mexican government as trappers. It is probable that all were regular users of the Apodaca Trail.

The only known historical accounts that specifically document the trail during the Old Spanish Trail period of 18291848 are related to the “Insurrection Against the Military Government in New Mexico.” In 1847, the multinational war hero George A. F. “Fredrick” Ruxton left military service and embarked upon a voyage to explore the frontier territory in what is now New Mexico and Colorado.

He describes his trip from Santa Fe to Taos: We crossed, next day, a range of mountains covered with pine and cedar; on the latter grew great quantities of mistletoe, and the contrast of its bright green and the somber hue of the cedars was very striking. The snow was melting on the ascent, which was exposed to the sun, and made the road exceedingly slippery and tiring to the animals.

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© Rachel Preston Prinz

Cañada de Apodaca Trail continued from page 18

Looking southwest over the Embudo Valley

On reaching the summit a fine prospect presented itself. The Rocky Mountains, stretching away on each side of me…whose isolated peaks stood out in bold relief against the clear, cold sky. Valleys and plains lay between them, through which the river wound its way in deep cañons.

In the distance was the snowy summit of the Sierra Nevada, bright with the rays of the setting sun, and at my feet lay the smiling vale of Taos, with its numerous villages and the curiously constructed pueblos of the Indians.

In the middle decade of the 19th century, W.W.H. Davis, a decorated officer from the Mexican War, was appointed to the New Mexico Territory as U.S. attorney.

With a great curiosity about the territory and its people, he traveled around the state, keeping a prolific diary. In 1856, Davis described the Apodaca route and its landmark features, including the natural pillar formation that identified the trail’s southern boundary.

Portions of the route were improved sometime after Davis’ account, and the Apodaca Trail was effectively abandoned with the completion of the Military Road through the Río Grande Gorge in 1876.

Lieutenant George Ruffner of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers described what remained of the road as follows: Between Taos and Santa Fé there formerly existed a very disagreeable passage by a steep and bad road over a mountain spur reaching from the main chain to the cañón of the Río Grande. Freight, except such as could be carried by burros, was almost prohibited…Now, however, through the munificence of the General Government, a new road has been constructed down the cañón of the Río Grande, and a level route,

straighter than either of the old roads, can accommodate all possible travel.

By the early 20th century, the Cañada de Apodaca route was relegated to “historic trail” when the route to the Harding and Copper Hill mines and the modern highway from Dixon to Peñasco were developed on a bypass to the south. This realignment of the major transportation corridor has helped to protect the historic road to some degree.

The Cañada de Apodaca Trail was first recognized and described by Taos matron, artist, and historian Helen Blumenschein in 1968. Since that time, field historians John Ramsey and Charles “Corky” Hawk, along with their collaborators, have mapped and documented the various pieces of the trail from Taos to the Española Valley. While the landscape remains largely intact and shares the same amazing vistas witnessed by the first European settlers from 400 years ago—and even before—our understanding of the importance of this arterial network from Santa Fe to Taos continues to evolve.

The intact historic landscape includes a contributing structure of braided trail that features an intact historic pack-trail alignment. This unique site, unknown to most and protected on BLM property, provides visitors with the opportunity to experience a setting that has changed little since its original travelers transported goods, services and people to markets near and far. i N e w M e x i c o ’s M a r k Henderson is a career archaeologist with over 30 years’ experience in the f ield and on the ground.

The mission of his f irm, Chupadero Archaeological Resources, is to encourage public participation in archaeological research.

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Nominating Sites for the National Register of Historic Places The Need to Preserve Both Historic Architecture and Wilderness Rachel Preston Prinz

Preserving amazing wild places and telling the story of how we evolved as a country Recently, I was asked to be part of a team brought together to produce nominations of six high-potential route segments of the Old Spanish National Historical Trail (OST) for the National Register of Historic Places. Each site would be located in and approved by the State Historic Preservation Offices, Tribal Historic Preservation Offices and U.S. Department of the Interior sections— Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Forest Service and Park Service—in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

What made this project unusual and challenging was that, of the entire 1,300-mile length of the OST, which is actually a network of many trails—only one location had absolute, undisputed evidence—a short series of rock steps cut into an impossibly steep canyon wall in Arizona—of the trail passing by a particular point during the period of significance. As the only architectural historian on the team, I watched as period historians and archaeologists tried and failed to document this historic trail system by traditional means.

Archaeologists, who were discovering new data that would throw the accepted history on its end, accused historians, who were retelling the old stories, of perpetuating verbal myths. They were confirming that, due to seasonal variations in water flows, flooding, drought, rockslides, trail failure and any number of other impossible-toaccount-for physical phenomena, the trail was regularly bypassed, moved, modified and restored again and again.

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The trail started to become anathema.

Battles ensued, and the more evidence we received, the more difficult it became to propose what we were putting on the register at all.

Enter fieldwork.

One of the first things that became clear at the several potential sites in each state was the importance of the transportation route in the development of the West as we know it. The paths the Spanish traveled followed, in large part, along previously established routes of aboriginal American natives. After the Spanish brought their horse and mule trains, American wagon caravans, early settlers and mapping expeditions would use the trails or at least follow the path of least resistance closest to them. This was followed by the development of train and road networks in the 19th century and the interstate highways system in modern times. The transportation infrastructure

© Rachel Preston Prinz

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e chose this place to live for a reason. Preserving some of the last pristine, northern New Mexican historic and environmental (wild) viewsheds is one way that we can preserve this beautiful and rugged place for our grandchildren.

Pilar landmark on the south edge of the trail

often obliterated any trace of the period trail and, most often, that damage started during evolutions of the trail during the period of significance. We came to realize that the trail was a concept much more than any reality.

After hiking many miles along the traces, we also realized that the trail was a direct response to its environment.

It hugged secure mountain edges, traversed slopes at specific intervals based on the use (i.e., wagons utilized easy slopes, where horses could manage much steeper sections) and traversed waterways, so that forage, camps and water could be had at regular intervals, approximately 22 miles apart, which happened to be the distance a continued on page 22

From the Old Spanish Trail Association Website

For traveling Mexican caravans between 1829 and 1848, the Old Spanish National Historic Trail (OST) was known as the shortest path to riches between Los Angeles and Santa Fe. It was a trail of commercial opportunity and western adventure, as well as slave trading, horse thieving and raids. The OST was established along a loose network of Indian footpaths that crossed the wide expanse of the Colorado Plateau and the Mojave Desert. With time, this newly established trade corridor attracted frontiersmen and U.S. military expeditions.

For a lucky few, the OST represented fortune. Quality woolen goods produced in New Mexico were traded for a surplus supply of horses and mules raised on California’s ranchos. These valued stock animals commanded premium prices in New Mexico and the western frontier of the United States. Traders and their mule caravans typically began their annual journey from New Mexico in late fall to take advantage of low-water river crossings and cooler temperatures across the hot Mojave Desert.

The map above illustrates the variant routes that developed as merchants developed their trade with the Rocky Mountain and Mojave Desert peoples and the rancheros of coastal California. In 2002, the OST received designation as a National Historic Trail, and today it is widely known as the longest, most arduous and crooked pack-mule route in America. All who took the trail—frontiersmen and young boys with a winter to spare, a handful of hardy families moving west, military expeditions, Indian guides and conscripts—shared the adventure of a lifetime in the Southwest’s rugged backcountry.

The 2,700 miles of trail that linked Santa Fe with Los Angeles pushed mule caravans to the limit. During the first week on the trail, the mules scrambled, swam, or dragged their handlers through more than a dozen river crossings. By the time the pack trains reached Los Angeles, they had crossed dune fields in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, found their way around the Grand Canyon, skirted the continent’s harshest deserts at Death Valley and slaked their thirst at Stinking Springs, Salt Creek, Alkali Canyon, Bitter Spring and the Inconsistent River.

Learn more about the Old Spanish Trail at www.oldspanishtrail.org/index.php

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National Register continued from page 21

We realized we were not just dealing with a thing—the trail—but were also rediscovering the trail’s place, that is, everything in the landscape that was used to identify the trail, including views to and from it. The trail responded to its environment.

Up, over, around—bypass cuts in the landscape were on the south and west for the most part—suggesting that those were intentionally located in the sun’s path to alleviate ice issues. Trails veered off on gentler slopes where there was jagged and hard rock that might undermine the horses’ and mules’ footing. In other places, the trail went straight up treacherous slopes where spring floods would make the ground too soft to travel along the river. Long scratches on rocks suggested wagons had been dragged up the slope without wheels by teams of horses instead of being allowed to roll back down should an unlucky horse lose its footing. The difficulty of travel along the trail was so apparent, it was physically painful to consider as we stood together in amazement taking in all this new information. We immediately realized that we would have to include the trail’s place—its landscape and its context within that landscape—in the nominations. If we didn’t, all we would be protecting would be an illusion, that is, a line on a map that represented a figment of a memory of something that may have existed once upon a time. That is just not acceptable for the National Register of Historic Places.

We also realized that, if we did not include the entirety of the passable area around the trail trace, it was possible that one day a developer could read that line on the map, build to its 30-foot easement—or whatever the state approved on either side of the approved trail trace—and obliterate our ability forever to conduct a responsible archaeological investigation of, say, a rediscovered camp site that was located when a lost map was found in some dusty family archive in México.

If we could choose the sites selectively and protect the most significant and

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likely intact sections of the trail, a visitor could vicariously experience an authentic sense of travel through the roughs and wilds of the 19th-century American West. We could accomplish something truly great; we could make it real for people. We could preserve, at least in experience, another of our amazing wild places. And we could tell the story of how we evolved as a country.

© Rachel Preston Prinz (3)

horseman could travel in a day before he and his horse needed to eat, drink and rest. In the period, the trail’s location was confirmed by identifying natural landmarks, including pillars and unique rock formations, as well as canyons and passes.

Applying This Realization in New Mexico

When I arrived home and started on the redocumentation of Taos’ Historic District and the rehabilitation plan for its acequias, I couldn’t stop thinking about what we’d learned in our fieldwork and realized that these projects, one linear—a water trail, if you will—and one structural—an assortment of buildings—were exactly like the trail. They were conceived in a specific place, and responded to cultural impulses and traditions as well as the physical constraints of the landscape and environment.

We realized that we would have to include the trail’s context within the landscape in the nominations.

I was immediately confronted with two astonishing examples of the danger of not using the holistic way of looking at a preservation project.

The first was witnessing the context destruction of the only existing intact torreón, or secure watch tower, in Taos, which had a protected area around it

A torreón restoration, before and after, on Paseo del Pueblo Norte in Taos, NM

upon which one could not build. An extensive land-modification project on the neighboring property came right up to that protective edge, ravaging the site around the historic structure. There is no way, should it be determined that a more extensive historic site existed there, that there will be any chance of discovery through archaeology after all that earth was moved around. And, the torreón, otherwise an architectural treasure, now sits awkwardly in a site devoid of context.

Then, while documenting the houses along the now-famous Ledoux Street, I realized that what we know as Ledoux Street was actually an alley, which provided access to the rear of these homes during their period of significance. That is not to say that the new alignment along Ledoux Street, or the façades of the buildings as they sit now, are not significant today for new reasons; they are. But because the back door has now become the front door, many people miss the most interesting parts of the buildings. What’s more, the homes on the south side of the street overlook the edge of the mesa that

Back side of Ledoux Street, Taos, New Mexico

Green Fire Times • March 2015

Historic Taos sits on, overlooking what was once the town’s spring source. To see the edge of Taos from this vantage helps the visitor to understand the security of being raised above the low plain during a period in which such security measures could mean life or death; that is, it tells part of the why of these homes, not just the what. It also emphasizes the importance of access to water. And no one knows it is there.

The site’s context has been lost. We cannot continue to let things like this happen without documenting them, or else we lose the truth of our history.

We lose context.

We see this loss of context happening all over the state, from the mandated fauxhistoric styles in our historic districts, which diminishes the value of the truly historic examples of those styles by obscuring them in a sea of false history, to the proposed development of the historic sanctuary at Chimayó’s landscape into a resort retreat center. We even see context being lost in favor of mining development at Mount Taylor. The question is, at what cost? While the landowners can and should have the right to make their space into a profitable venture, don’t we have some obligation to ask the owners to preserve and protect a context-sensitive view of the piece of cultural heritage for the future? Because once these things are lost, the truth of them is usually lost for good.

It is time to start approaching preservation in a way that treats not only the monument itself but its site, its site within a landscape, and the views afforded from various historical vantages within that landscape. That way, we can capture and protect the sense of place that gave the site a reason to exist there in the first place. i

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SERVICES

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Green Fire Times • March 2015

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Scottish Rite Center Space available: • special events • weddings • meetings

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Green Fire Times • March 2015

505.982.4414

Secretary@NMScottishRite.org

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University of New Mexico–Taos Skills Development in Sustainable Design

W

ithin a half-hour drive from the University of New Mexico-Taos Construction Technology Department’s Green Trades Training Center, one can find more than 900 years of living architectural history ranging from the historic Taos Pueblo—a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage site—to the Earthship Biotecture compound across the Río Grande Gorge Bridge.

Even before the Chevron mine in Questa closed last year, jobs in Taos County were scarce. To best serve the local population, UNM-Taos acts as both a community college for northern New Mexicans, providing traditional vocational education (now called career technology), as well as a pathway toward upper-division and graduate coursework through UNM’s main campus in Albuquerque. Housed in the old vocational technology building at the downtown campus of Taos High School, the Green Trades Training Center has a unique and varied program designed to facilitate the development of 21st-century job skills.

is partnering with UNM-Taos to offer a popular new class on Earthship housing.

Students can also register for Intro to Green Business, Computer-Aided Drafting and other courses.

This spring, the UNM-Taos Sustainability Institute green-building class will be engaged in a collaborative design-build project on campus. After studying affordable-housing challenges in Taos County together in the Green Trades Training Center, they will design and build a mobile, tiny house. Materials under consideration include conventional stud framing and dense-pack cellulose insulation, as well as radical alternatives such as inoculated mushroom building blocks that literally grow together around a waste-fiber substrate to form insulation and walls. For those interested in following the institute or this project, a link to a video blog will be posted at www.

SustainTaos.com

Like Earthship Biotecture’s founder Michael Reynolds, Construction Technology Department Chairman and Program Director Mark Goldman considers the Rocky Mountain Spine— the bioregion that spans from the Pecos River in north-central New Mexico to the headwaters of the Colorado—an ideal place to design and test solar housing prototypes. This extreme environment requires special design considerations.

Its harsh winters, hot dry summers, steep mountain valleys and exposed plateaus require reliable heating and adequate cooling, sometimes on the same day.

The institute is developing intensives both for local residents and for those interested in “destination learning” in Taos. Last August, a new venture, the Humanitarian Design Seminar, featured presenters from India, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. More than 250 individuals attended four days of lectures and field trips. Keynote speaker Brian Bell, executive director of Design Corps and the Public Interest Design Institute, told the audience that, in his opinion, nearly every problem in society can be viewed as a design issue. Participants explored topics from acequias and local agriculture to upcycling and economic development. The Trimble Corporation, which owns SketchUp, a radical new 3D-design platform, sent one of its top trainers to teach tips and tricks. On the final day, some of Earthship Biotecture’s global leaders gave an overview and tour of Taos’ trademark off-grid development.

The seminar ended with a locavore feast at the Farmhouse Café.

To address these challenges, Construction Technology students can gain specific skills, from welding, plumbing and carpentry to introductory courses in more complex disciplines such as sustainable agriculture, green building and solar hydronic systems. Earthship Biotecture

With the successful rollout of the UNMTaos Sustainability Institute, the Green Trades Training Center is starting to get national and international attention. This year, the institute will offer one- and twoweek hands-on intensives with evening gatherings and featured speakers in a

The Green Trades Training Center teaches 21st-century job skills.

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lecture hall. There will be plenaries, discussion groups and collaborative design charrettes to synthesize, cross-pollinate and expand on the core content. Tentatively scheduled for late June, subjects will include sustainable agriculture, UNM-Taos instructor Mark Goldman with students tiny-house design and of the old and the new. We are developing construction, Earthship Biotecture, 3D a unique higher-education hybrid that is drafting with Trimble SketchUp, and intended to be highly inclusive to anyone electrical theory. Check www.SustainTaos. interested in joining us.” com for details and to confirm exact dates.

Mark Goldman said he is excited that there is so much interest in these issues. A veteran of over 25 years in the construction industry in New Mexico, the Distinguished Alumni of Boston Architectural College member noted that “we are in the perfect time and place here at UNM-Taos to seek new solutions for a variety of housing ideas that link the best

Information on summer classes will be available on the UNM-Taos website: www.Taos.unm.edu later this spring. i Asha Stout serves on the faculty of UNM–Taos, where he teaches hands-on building and design courses in green technology. He views “safe” housing as an unalienable right, ecological restoration as a grave necessity, and is passionate about the pursuit of Lomakatsi, or life in balance.

Hacking the Earthship

In search of an earth-shelter that works for everybody by rachel preston prinz and contributors

400 pages with many photos; available in print or digital; archinia.com

Built with recycled materials such as used earthpacked tires, honeycombed aluminum cans and glass bottles, Earthships are designed to be cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and to work with the landscape in ways that have minimal impact on the environment. They direct rain and snow from roofs to cisterns. The water is filtered, pressurized and pumped to a solar thermal heater on the roof. After it is used in sinks, showers or bathtubs, it is directed to greywater planters to be filtered and aerated. A pump then moves it to toilets for flushing. Earthships produce their own heating and cooling through passive solar design, ventilation, photovoltaic arrays, wind turbines and backup gas generators. They produce food via a “food forest” and indoor “salad bars.”

Hacking the Earthship: In Search of a Natural Earth Shelter that Works for Everybody, builds upon the visionary legacy of Michael Reynolds’ trademarked Earthship Biotecture designs. Rachel Preston Prinz loves the beautiful organic forms and mindful intention behind Earthships—living off the grid, generating your own energy, growing food and living self-reliantly. Living in Taos, New Mexico, the epicenter of the Earthship phenomenon, and working as a local designer, Prinz often received requests from people to help make their “ships” work better. When she posted common problems on her firm’s website, clients started asking her to help them hack the design to find a way to make their homes perform to the standard they were seeking.

Prinz and her collaborators surveyed Earthship owners, studied cases in 14 countries and visited 20 sites in the U.S. They read thousands of pages of commentaries on buildings, builders, materials and systems, dug into what research had been done and collected weather data to see what tweaks could make the homes work well in particular climates. This research is shared in Hacking the Earthship.

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© Seth Roffman

Asha Stout

So Long, Big Oil and Big Coal

Stanley Crawford

I

started experimenting with solar in the early 1970s with the construction of a Trombe wall, possibly the first in New Mexico. A Trombe wall is essentially a very thin greenhouse with glazing applied vertically to a stone or adobe wall.

The glazing can be in the form of clear fiberglass, polycarbonate or glass, with a two- to six-inch air space between glazing and wall surface, which is painted black to absorb heat. Heat migrates through the mass of the wall in the course of the day and radiates into the living space throughout the night. Being vertical, Trombe walls collect solar radiation only in the winter, not in the summer when the sun is high overhead.

Next came an attached solar greenhouse inspired by the work of solar pioneers Bill and Susan Yanda; it consisted of an eight-by-30-foot structure attached to the bedroom wing of our south-facing, homemade adobe house. The Yanda design called for the glazing to be sloped at 45 degrees. We started out with polyethylene sheeting because it was cheap, replacing it soon with Lascolite, semirigid clear fiberglass panels. But the 45-degree angle presented several problems. As you approached the south wall, headroom decreased, limiting easily usable indoor space. And the greenhouse overheated in late spring, summer and early fall.

The PV net-metering system atop our guesthouse generated almost enough electricity to satisfy all our needs.

Twenty years later, in the fall of 2013, we completed version three, expanded to 14 by 36 feet, with an insulated concrete floor replacing uninsulated cement floor tiles. We were able to reuse the double-glazed window panels. The added space allowed us to install a ping-pong table, which doubles as a dinner table for large parties, and a stock-tank fish pond to maintain mosquito fish or gambusia to replenish the pond of our outdoors-constructed wetlands, which is our own little sewage-treatment plant. And we still have room for spring vegetable starts, a dozen large potted tomato plants, a fig tree and a Meyer lemon, and room in the fall for 20 bushels of winter squash.

But the attached greenhouse is not our only season-extending tool. About six years ago, we had a 14-by-30-foot unheated hoophouse built. For the first years, we used it to grow tomatoes. Our farm is in a cold spot in the Embudo Valley, and we can have light frosts into early June and frost on the lawn in mid-August.

The hoophouse added a month at both ends of the growing season for tomatoes and gave us a much better harvest. But there is quickly a glut of tomatoes each season at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market, where we sell most of our produce. So, last fall, Scott Moore, who manages the farm now, tightened up the hoophouse and planted various greens and several types of lettuce, which have thrived through the winter.

In spring 2013, Sol Luna Solar, based in Dixon, installed a 3.65 kW photovoltaic (PV) system atop our guesthouse, a net-metering system that, at the time, generated almost enough electricity to satisfy all our needs. This and the new greenhouse expansion led inadvertently to a solution of the problem of solar hot water in the main house, in the form of a heat-pump water heater. Heat pumps work

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Green Fire Times • March 2015

like refrigerators, extracting heat—or cold—f rom the atmosphere. Our heat-pump water heater pulls heat from the greenhouse air and turns it into hot water, a simple and elegant solution to the hot-water problem. Within a year, savings in propane use have essentially paid for it.

By contrast, solar hot-water systems are complex and expensive in northern latitudes where freezing is an issue, though our heat-pump water heater is fed by two simple solar tanks on the roof. Rebuilt 1984 Cornell batch heaters, they are made up of two 30-gallon tanks enclosed in insulated, reflective cabinets with triple glazing.

In the course of rebuilding the greenhouse in 2012, I had a 240-volt line installed across the roof, to the end of adding an outlet in the garage for a plug-in hybrid or electric car. This we acquired last fall, a 2012 Chevy Volt, which has a 30- to 40mile range on battery power alone, shifting to gas-powered electricity generation thereafter. On a recent trip from Dixon to Española and back, the car ran at 199 miles per gallon. A Dixon-Taos round trip yields up to160 miles per gallon, and Santa Fe and back, with four hours of recharging in the Railyard public garage, about 85 miles per gallon.

All of this does not entirely free us from big oil or big coal, upon which everyone will always be somewhat dependent, if only for the energy needed to manufacture equipment for generating renewable energy (RE) such as solar panels and windmills. We need a few more PV panels to completely cover our electricity usage, but most of our space-heating needs and all of our hot water are provided

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© Seth Roffman

The greenhouse has since gone through several iterations. In version two, we tore down the 45-degree angle framing and replaced it with vertical framing and double-glazed, glass patio-door inserts. Four feet of the roof was sheathed with double-wall polycarbonate panels and four feet of insulated roofing, which eliminated the overheating problem. But the greenhouse space, which opened into the bedrooms via two sets of French doors and into the kitchen via double windows, was too narrow for multiple uses. In the springtime, we started ten thousand plants for the farm. In the fall, we cured some 50 bushels of winter squash. In both cases, there was little room for anything else. And, throughout the winter, much of the space was taken up by large pots of tomatoes.

What’s a Heat Pump?

by our attached greenhouse. More than half of our northern New Mexico driving is powered by the electricity we ourselves generate. Propane still serves for cooking and for a small, efficient space heater in our bedroom. We still use diesel for our tractor at the rate of about 30 gallons a year and gasoline for the farm pickup, which averages 20 miles per gallon.

John M. Onstad

S

ince the beginning of civilization, people have heated their homes by burning things: wood, coal, peat and, more recently, fuel oil, kerosene, natural gas and propane.

On the farm, we pay self-employment tax but little or no income tax and, thus, have been unable to benefit from various RE tax credits. For the PV system, these amount to about 30 percent of the cost of the system. For a new Chevy Volt or other electric car, the tax credit is $7,500. This leads me to wonder why so many middleclass people fail to take advantage of these subsidies, to the end of reducing their carbon footprints and having a positive effect on global climate change. Inertia? Apathy? Ignorance of new technologies?

An old argument is this: “Why pay all of your electricity 15 or 20 years in advance by investing in a PV system?” To which an obvious answer is, why not radically reduce your carbon footprint while you can? Or, instead of installing PV, are you willing to continue to add to carbon pollution these next 15 or 20 years?

© Seth Roffman

WWWW

Another argument is, “It will take a major catastrophe to change things,” which is the litany of those who believe that it will take a major catastrophe to change things. Another couple of Katrinas or Sandys, the failure of the Atlantic gulfstream, the permanent flooding of Miami and New York, the drying up of Sao Paolo or Los Angeles. This ignores the fact that we ourselves are already that catastrophe, in the millions of gallons of petroleum and tons of coal we have used up over our lifetimes for heating, cooling, lighting, transportation and consumer goods. The operative term here is “it”—referring to out there, the forces of good and evil, the political system, the oil and coal companies. What’s missing is “me” and “you.”

What? I can’t change without being driven by a major catastrophe? You can’t?

A heat pump makes considerably more energy than it consumes

So let’s discuss a home-heating device that doesn’t burn anything: a hear pump.

A heat pump is a refrigeration machine that extracts plentiful heat from the atmosphere, even when it’s bitterly cold outside, and uses this heat to warm your home. Heat pumps also can extract heat from the earth, underground aquifers, lakes or ponds.

In my lifetime, we have gone from gas-guzzlers to relatively fuel-efficient vehicles, from the typewriter to the computer, from the wall phone to the smart phone, from ocean liners to jumbo jets, from fountain pens to ballpoint pens, from paper maps to GPSs, from hot air balloons to drones. None of these technological changes have been purely positive, but the shift away from largely fossil-fuel sources of energy to largely renewable sources requires little more personal adjustment than some of the technological changes of the past 75 years. With, however, one caveat: the future of the human project is now at stake. If we wish to see our children and grandchildren live in a world not driven by extremes of climate change and resultant civil and international strife, then change we must—and fast.

Seem far-fetched? It did to me several years ago when I first began to investigate this technology.

Stanley Crawford has farmed and written in the Embudo Valley of New Mexico since 1969.

www.GreenFireTimes.com

© Anna C. Hansen

In the present political and environmental climate, doing nothing is not an option.

As drivers of cars and consumers of food and fossil fuels, we are living lives that we cannot morally or intellectually defend in a world of gross inequality and unprecedented human-induced habitat destruction and species extinction.

Going solar—as much as you can—may not save the world, but it is doing something positive.

It’s setting an example, and, who knows, if widely enough followed, it may well end up helping save the world in the long run. i

These fuels heat effectively and cheaply because a lot of energy in the form of BTUs (British thermal units) is stored in a relatively small volume. A cord (4 ft. x 4 ft. x 8 ft.) of piñón wood contains about 22 million BTUs, a gallon of liquefied propane about 90,000 BTUs and a cubic foot of compressed natural gas about 1,000 BTUs. At 75 percent efficiency in a wood stove, a cord of piñón will heat a 1,500-square-foot, well-insulated home for about a month, if you don’t mind hauling and splitting wood, tending the fire all day and dealing with the smoke and ashes, not to mention waking to a cold home at 6 a.m. And, as cozy and comfortable as a wood fire is, if we all heated our homes that way, the air would be considerably dirtier. Further, all of the above energy sources produce the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) as well as other pollutants.

Consider the freezer compartment of your home refrigerator, where the temperature is about –10° F. If you open the freezer door to load your groceries and then close it, the temperature might rise to 0° F. The compressor turns on and reduces the temperature from 0° F to –10° F. and blows warm air on your feet. This is a good example of how a heat pump works, extracting BTUs from a frigid environment and producing usable heat as a byproduct.

I have stated that a heat pump doesn’t burn anything, which is technically

correct. But it is powered by electricity from a power company (like PNM), which burns something like coal or natural gas to produce electricity.

Here’s where the “magic” of a heat pump comes into play: it utilizes energy to make considerably more energy than it consumes.That is, for every kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity purchased from the power company—or produced by your photovoltaic (PV) system—a heat pump will extract 3 to 4 kWh of energy from the outside air during the winter months (1 kWh of electricity equals 3,415 BTUs).

If you research heat pumps on the Internet, you’ll read numerous comments that tell you heat pumps don’t work when it’s cold outside. Don’t believe them!

That was true 30 years ago. I’ve installed a couple dozen in the Santa Fe area, and they heated just fine when the mercury dipped to -20 ° F in 2011, and that’s without any form of back-up heat.

So, what are the benefits of heat-pump technology to you as a homeowner?

1. A heat pump heats in the winter and cools in the summer.

2. Because a heat pump extracts energy from winter ambient air, it’s a renewable energy source like PV solar, thermal solar and wind power. It will comfortably heat your home at 2 a.m. in January.

3. If you’re currently heating with propane or electricity, it can reduce your heating bill by up to 75 percent.

4. A heat pump can be an affordable heating and cooling system to install in a small zone such as a converted garage, sunroom, bonus room or addition, as well as your whole house.

5. It can provide heating and cooling for a home with a failed radiant-heating system, as well as cooling for a home with radiant heating.

6. Last but not least, a heat pump can make chilled water for radiant-floor cooling, a surprisingly affordable way to air-condition your home.

John M. Onstad is the owner and general manager of Hubbell Electro-Mechanical. His company has designed, installed and repaired heating and cooling systems in the Santa Fe area since 1980.

505.471.4221, www.hubbellmech.com

Green Fire Times • March 2015

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continued from page 10

Territorial architecture was usually constructed of thick courses of sun-dried adobe bricks and was sometimes framed, most often in one or two stories. In Santa Fe and eventually elsewhere,Territorial architecture utilized newly available bricks at the top of the parapet wall, at the roof, to reduce maintenance. These homes often used a central hall plan, with rooms placed somewhat symmetrically across the hall from one another to allow for better ventilation.

Small, unassuming wooden pediments were placed over exterior doors and windows, ostensibly to shed rain. The trim, which might have included square rather than round porch posts, as well as cornices, corbels and brackets, was almost always painted white, although blue and turquoise are also common now. In all likelihood, this was an architectural practice that was purely sentimental in value; using these milled-wood details would mean the houses looked more homey. Interior spaces often had whitewashed walls to bounce light into the space, with gingham or similar fabric wainscot to dampen sound and hide scratches, or they might have used brightly painted upper walls with a neutral base at the wainscot in the more native style. While earthen floors were still predominant on the exterior spaces, interior floors were almost always planed wood.

We also see this architectural style start to open up to the street. Doors and windows are larger because they have the tools and access to glass needed to make them so.

Windows are double hung, and both top and bottom sashes are actively opened and closed to improve natural ventilation. The front doors often utilized sidelights and an operable transom at the top, to provide better daylighting and natural ventilation. Porches faced the street. We also see the first wood-burning stoves, which allowed people to warm the spaces now cooled by the larger windows. Like homes on the East Coast, brick fireplaces are located outboard of the structure, placed centrally on the building’s end walls. A wooden mantle completes the homey conversion of the fireplace, and a mirror above effectively bounces more daylight through the space.These buildings start to feel more open.

Places like Las Vegas, New Mexico, which were removed from large populations of indigenous and Hispanic settlers, became highly Americanized. Builders in these areas followed Colonial and subsequent design styles, adding pitched roofs and fine shingle details to framed buildings, while Santa Fe and other more historically connected locales preferred dirt-covered flat roofs and brick details.

Northern New Mexico Architecture

Because of the scarcity of skilled crafters and the lack of railroad access in northern New Mexico, when Territorial in other locations was getting quite decorative, the style of architecture in the north was minimalist, with a central-hallway floor plan, a singlefaçade portal facing the street, simplified Territorial-style trim and door decoration and no use of brick. The architectural style of the north was most often modified with a pitched metal roof. It can be assumed that at least part of the cause for this change was weather-related, because a pitched roof will shed snow, maximize winter solar gain, and protect the earthen walls from needing as much repair each year. The uniquely northern combination of old and new was given its own style, called Northern New Mexico style.

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Green Fire Times • March 2015

Queen Anne and Victorian Architecture

By 1879, the asymmetrical Queen Anne style—unrelated to the queen for whom it was named—had already been vastly popular in the eastern U.S. for more than 20 years. When the railroad arrived in New Mexico that year, so did change. The rails made access to materials and labor more manageable, so large expanses of glass, metal, milled lumber and milled and fabricated details became commonplace.

With the introduction of Queen Anne style into New Mexico, Ufer House, Taos various infusions of the Victorian style came into vogue: steep scalloped-metal shingle or clay tile roofs, wrap-around porches with elaborate, turned wooden details, like those added to the green and white Walter Ufer house on Des Georges Lane just east of the Taos Plaza; shingle details and pure Queen Anne details, like those found on the Miramon house on the northeast corner of Morada Lane and Kit Carson; and corner towers, dormers, bays, and turrets. The Victorian was a particularly embraced fashion of building in the Territories because it encouraged individuation and experimentation with materials, two skills for which the territorialists were renowned.

© Anna C. Hansen

Early efforts to introduce the ancient Grecian temple-influenced style to New Mexico were deeply affected by the existing architecture of the region and its inhabitants’ propensity for ignoring trends of style. The resulting architectural form—a fusion of vernacular models and Greek-influenced parts and pieces—is called Territorial. In this period, wealth was not grandiose. Wealth was indicated by having good woolen blankets and rugs, iron locks on the doors and larger rooms.

Beginning in the early 20th century, New Mexican architecture began to transform again.

Those styles that are a hodge-podge of Victorian tastes are referred to by the state’s Historic Preservation Division as Folk Victorian. Other styles were introduced after the arrival of the railroad, including Italianate and Romanesque.

The Railroad’s Influence on NM Architecture

By this time, the rails were bringing ideas from the eastern and western states, and the timing of the influx of Anglos was like an invasion of sorts—everything that represented the “old ways” or the New Mexico Style was admonished. Some of the churches in northern New Mexico were modernized with details of the Romanesque and Gothic Revivals popular in the East. This updating was dictated by the European architecture enthusiast Bishop Lamy of Santa Fe, who was French and a Francophile, as were the mass of missionaries he brought to serve the peoples of his bishopdom. Our historic religious architecture was forever changed by these dictates.

Beginning in the early 20th century, New Mexican architecture began to transform again. By the time of its acceptance into statehood, in 1912, the Territorial period was literally—and figuratively—complete.

Three trends emerged: one group of settlers went for the “all new,” merging new forms with old or replacing old forms entirely; another group of artists arrived from the Western art world and began building entirely new fusion homes of their own; while the third group started looking backwards to the “old way.”

Architectural firms like Greene and Greene, based in California, were changing the way people looked at building and inventing a wholly American style of architecture, much of which was a response to what was Details at the Fechin House in Taos

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© Rachel Preston Prinz (2)

Sustainable NM

Beneficial Farms seen as overly decorative architecture of the Victorian age, and blended with an Indian—as in the subcontinent between the Orient and Europe—concept of a low structure with a veranda, called a bungalow. The California and bungalow styles— simple one-story plans with large porches, squared wooden beams, horizontal emphasis and stone detailing—were in vogue in the West. When people came from California, they brought these ideas with them. Russian-American artist Nicolai Fechin borrowed bits and pieces of all the styles mentioned above, including the new California-influenced methodology, and merged them with wood-carving influences from his home country and ours, creating a style at his home and studio on Paseo del Pueblo Norte in Taos, that defies a single architectural attribution.

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Merchants and traders, as well as some who had performed military service, found themselves quite rich during this period. Prospecting and other interests made others even richer. Affluence was demonstrated and, as happens, separations between the haves and have-nots became obvious in architecture as in life. This was when the first elaborate lodges were built in the hunting and ranching areas, and New Mexico’s first mansions were erected in the cities. Some of the larger, historic haciendas were mansions, in many ways, but they remained true to their working ranch/farm roots.

Shares@beneficialfarm.com

505-470-1969

Spanish Pueblo-Revival Style Architecture Traits

© Anna C. Hansen

Within 30 years of statehood, New Mexican architecture had evolved dramatically. Where, before, structures were nearly purely vernacular, being heavily influenced by the ideals of simplicity and economy, buildings in the early 20th century became, essentially, architectural. They were formalized, codified and elaborated upon to John Gaw Meem building at UNM-ABQ distinguish the frill and fluff from the necessary. Those who could afford to emphasize grand design did so, and those who would not or could not opted for various adaptations of the precedent styles, often using them in new and innovative ways.

© Rachel Preston Prinz

Those who would look backwards were led by the talented architect John Gaw Meem and the architectural firm of Rapp and Rapp. These two powerhouses of great design fused a revival of both the Pueblo and the Spanish Colonial styles into a style unique to New Mexico called Spanish-Pueblo Revival.

S pa n is h P u e bl oRevival architecture is characterized by a return to adobe construction, often with battered walls; an undulating stepped, parapeted roofline; rounded corners; earthcolored cementitious Old Martínez Hall in Rancho de Taos was restored in 2011 stucco on the exterior; as Old Martina’s Hall. stepped facades on multistory buildings that rest on at-grade and above-grade foundations. A lowpitched or flat roof is supported by exposed vigas or faux vigas. Corner fireplaces and built-in seating and storage make for inviting, interior respite places. We begin to see painted and stained glass used in windows. And they returned to the days of beautifully hand-carved details, reintroducing carved wooden details on doors, window grilles and corbels. i

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Eco-Delivery Services • 505.920.6370

Estevan Arellano continued from page 28

NM Acequias continued from page 15

The Zanjeras continued from page 25

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A Tribute to Linda Pedro Advocate for People with Disabilities

Alejandro López

© Alejandro López

constant struggle to obtain justice for those it most often eludes. It is not an exaggeration to say that Linda was a consummate warrior in defense of human dignity and the values of nature, community, love and compassion.

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remember how happy my elderly mother was each time she returned f rom retablo-painting workshops conducted by Linda Pedro at the local senior citizen’s center. My mother, like so many from every walk of life, was enthralled and deeply inspired by this larger-than-life woman who did so much—often, the seemingly impossible—from within the confines of a wheelchair and a seriously compromised body. Without a doubt, Linda Pedro was one of the great souls who have inhabited the mountainous community of Chimayó in northern New Mexico. She lived there for over 40 years, before passing away on Jan. 13th of this year.

Linda left a permanent imprint on practically everything she touched and everyone who knew her. Together with a long line of people who played essential roles in her epic journey, she embraced the world with flair, magnanimity and gusto.

After surviving a horrendous car crash in the 1960s, when she was in her early 20s, Linda was left a paraplegic but, surprisingly, she was inwardly unshaken. Doctors did not give her long to live. But Linda summoned her enormous will, not just to live but to live powerfully for another 40 years—like a fire about to go out at any moment but doesn’t. During those years, she dedicated herself to the service of community and to the

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Linda faced a multitude of severe physical and economic hardships and upheavals of her own and became a staunch advocate for people with disabilities and for those living on the margins of society through no fault of their own. She was dealt an early lesson in this nonpaying role soon after her accident, when government agencies sought to deny her the right to raise her son because of her physical impairments. She responded by taking the government to court, demanding that, as the child’s mother, she be allowed the right to decide the future of their relationship. Not only did she win the case to retain care and custody of her son, Daniel; over many years, her home became a haven for many tribal youth from across the country who lacked family or home.

A consummate warrior in defense of human dignity In spite of the goods and services she so freely shared, Linda found herself having to wrestle with powerful agencies in order to procure even the most minimal resources with which to sustain herself—a telling commentary on our country’s social services system.

In the end, her advocacy work for people with disabilities provoked a radical shift throughout the nation in the level and kinds of services our government and society are willing to provide to its most helpless citizens.

L i n d a w a s a h i g h l y re s p e c t e d community leader, spokesperson and outspoken proponent for a heroinf ree community. She led marches down the dusty roads of Santa Cruz and Chimayó. She was a member of the Rainbow Coalition, the Raza Unida Party and the Native American Church. She was also an accomplished artist.

One of the highlights of Linda’s life took place in 1984, when she was asked to introduce presidential candidate Jesse Jackson at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

Because there was no way for a person in a wheelchair to get on the stage, a special platform had to be erected.

The entire country was able to witness an unprecedented act of kindness and consideration being extended to someone who, having survived a major catastrophe, had managed to transmute tragedy into triumph.

Because Linda required continuous care and assistance for so many years, family, friends and even strangers rallied to provide her with the support she needed. This made it possible for her to accomplish the work that brought great meaning and satisfaction to her life and healing to the world.

Although she was the recipient of much care, Linda nevertheless simultaneously functioned as a trainer in the art of caring for people with disabilities. She became an informal teacher in a wide range of subjects she had mastered. Her subtle embodiment of the archetypal wise woman-teacher ultimately may have been her greatest accomplishment and contribution to the world.

I will never forget the time when, on World Prayer Day, a pleasant summer

day in June, a friend and I hoisted Linda, seated in her wheelchair, onto a platform at a Sikh camp deep in the Jémez Mountains. There, on a richly brocaded cushion sat Amma, the “hugging saint,” a Hindu holy woman who embodies boundless love and compassion and had traveled all the way from India. Hour after hour, many hundreds of people inched their way up to see her to receive her blessing. When the ecstatic Linda finally reached Amma’s welcoming arms, upon contact these mighty women both seemed instantly to grow in stature and beauty, uniting in a wave of mutual recognition, joy and unconditional love.

In her final years, Linda mounted an extraordinary effort to remain afloat upon a tumultuous sea of increasing physical complications. It was a heroic struggle, and when it was not possible to fight any longer, she peacefully surrendered to the forces that ultimately decree our deaths.

Kevin McCourt, one of the many who attended Linda’s memorial service in Chimayó, said, “We left Linda’s home feeling blessed, trying to not forget the beautiful images of four fires surrounding each speaker, the smoke carrying their words and songs to the four winds along with Linda’s spirit.

There was Calvin Magpie with his beautiful songs, the bagpiper, the man in the wheelchair and many others who shared memories of a triumphant Linda gone home at last. Indeed, it was a joy to see her take flight on the back of this most beautiful ceremony.” i Alejandro López is a writer, photographer and educator.

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Sustainable Santa Fe Update Bianca Sopoci-Belknap

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ast month NASA released a report that warns that the United States is headed toward a megadrought the likes of which has not been seen in 1,000 years. If nothing is done to reduce the carbon load released into the atmosphere by human activity, NASA’s climate models show megadroughts forming over much of the U.S. by the end of this century that could last 20, 30, even 40 years. That’s two, three, or four times the length of the drought that resulted in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. If immediate action is taken to reduce carbon buildup, droughts will still happen but won’t be as severe. Meanwhile, in New Mexico, 65 percent of the state is experiencing moderate to severe drought, and the average precipitation is at 83 percent for the year, according to the state’s New Mexico Drought Monitoring Working Group.

Has anyone noticed how uncannily warm it was in February? What you’re noticing is the steady trend toward higher average temperatures. And in late February, the East Coast was hit with record-low, freezing temperatures. Extremes on both ends.

This is what climatologists are predicting and what we are already experiencing.

Given the climate alarms firing daily, it is no wonder that energy policy has become one of the most discussed issues in local media outlets and public forums in New Mexico. Especially, given our unprecedented opportunity to drastically cut our dependence on coal by replacing the San Juan Generating Station’s units 2 and 3 with renewable energy (RE). The city of Santa Fe was one of 15 parties to the replacement power case before the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission. The city was one of 11 parties to oppose the Stipulated Agreement between PNM and PRC staff, which proposes to replace the lost energy supply with nuclear imported from Arizona and the purchase of additional shares in the remaining San Juan coal units.

As the record closes on the case and the hearing examiner contemplates his decision, the Santa Fe community is considering how to reduce its energy footprint, regardless of the outcome of the case. A resolution directing city staff to explore the legal and financial possibilities and limitations for a municipal electric utility, as well as a potential partnership with the county, passed the city council on Jan. 28 with a deadline for staff to report back to the council with their findings within 45 days. The resolution, introduced by Councilor Joseph Maestas and cosponsored by councilors Chris Rivera and Peter Ives, is meant to equip councilors and the community with the information needed to determine what the next steps for public power and RE deployment should be, given that the city does not have the authority to condemn and use its powers of eminent domain to take over the electric grid. The city is therefore looking for creative ways to flex its muscles—using its home rule authority—to break open opportunities to bring the economic and environmental benefits of RE to its residents and achieve its climate change mitigation goals.

The Sustainable Santa Fe Commission voted to support Councilor Ives’ ordinance establishing the city’s authority to create a Municipal Electric Utility. If passed, the ordinance would open the door for the city to entertain competitive bids from energy suppliers (many of whom could offer significantly greater percentages of renewables) for new developments within city limits and a 5-mile radius around the city. It would also open the door for the city to explore financing and wholesale energy supply to expand its own RE projects.

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Meanwhile, the city continues to try to push PNM to provide more RE through the city’s recent intervention in the replacement power case in opposition to the utility’s coal and nuclear proposal and through the city’s inclusion of PNM in the Climate Action Task Force. The company’s investments and energy plans make it hard to imagine how Santa Fe Protestors at PNM’s replacement power hearing will achieve its goal of carbon neutrality by 2040 without somehow breaking free from PNM’s monopoly offerings.

The city’s Climate Action Task Force recently voted to include a caveat in its recommendations for RE action steps to the city council. The caveat points out that many of the RE proposals will be stymied by PNM’s current rate-case proposal, which includes significant disincentives for solar.

PNM’s proposal, which includes significant disincentives for solar, would stymie Santa Fe’s goal of carbon neutrality.

Under the current rate-case proposal, solar users will be charged a $6/kW/month access fee that will increase the cost for a typical residential installation (4.4kW) by $317 per year. PNM projects that this will reduce the rooftop solar business by 83 percent by 2017. This would be an estimated $28 million per year impact on New Mexico’s economy. PNM’s proposal also seeks to eliminate the energy-banking option for distributed generation solar producers, which would further reduce solar benefits to owners by approximately $100 per year. While these barriers to solar largely impact residential customers with the privilege of access to homeownership and the capital needed for the up-front costs associated with solar, the overall rate-case proposal will disproportionately impact working families. The proposal includes a 16.3 percent overall rate increase. The total increased cost to ratepayers is $63 million, with the greatest increases targeting residential ratepayers. If approved, residential ratepayers will have seen their rates increase by 64 percent since 2008! PNM is also proposing to increase its monthly fixed customer charge by 256 percent, raising it from $5 to $12.80, which is 59 percent higher than the average customer charge of the investorowned-utilities (IOUs) in the region. PNM is also proposing to increase the Return on Equity, the policy that enables it to recoup 100 percent of capital expenditures plus a guaranteed rate of return (i.e., profit) from 10 to 10.5 percent. Critics of the rate proposal—and there are many; more than a dozen parties have intervened—are attacking the proposal on both economic and environmental grounds. To learn more about these efforts and how you can get involved, visit sustainablesantafe. wordpress.com Bianca Sopoci-Belknap is program director for New Energy Economy, director of Earth Care and chair of the Sustainable Santa Fe Commission.

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NEWSBITEs Green Buildings Get Lower Interest Rate Loans

Taos County Courthouse App

Rick Fedrizzi, chief executive and founding chair of the U.S. Green Building Council, which administers the LEED green building rating system, says this is both an incentive to build green and an incentive for existing buildings to achieve certification.

MIX Santa Fe Wins Bright Ideas Award for Innovations in Government

The U.S. Federal National Mortgage Association—Fannie Mae—will for the first time provide lower interest rate loans to green multifamily residential buildings.

Fannie Mae will grant a 10-basis-point interest-rate refinance reduction for the acquisition or supplemental mortgage loan for buildings with a green building certification. For example, if the market interest rate is 4 percent on the loan, with this pricing break the new rate is 3.9 percent. On a $10-million dollar loan amortizing over 30 years, the owner would save $95,000 in interest payments over a 10-year term.

In addition to having a smaller carbon footprint, green buildings cost 19 percent less to maintain than their conventional counterparts, according to a U.S. General Services Administration study.

Earthen Materials Architecture Construction Conference

The Eighth International Conference on Architecture and Construction with Earthen Materials will take place in the St. Francis Auditorium of the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe from Oct. 2-4. The field of interest for this year’s conference will include adobe, rammed earth, compressed earth block (CEB) and monolithic adobe (COB). Any method that uses clay as a binder will be considered.

Abstract submissions are being accepted through April 10. Full papers from accepted presenters are due on Aug. 21. Conference activities will include podium presentations and poster sessions, tours to local earthbuilding sites of interest, and preconference and postconference earthbuilding workshops. The conference organizer is Adobe in Action, an approved Continuing Education Systems provider through the American Institute of Architects. Earthusa.org

Industrial Revenue Bonds Approved for Solar Plant

A company planning to build a solar-power generating plant next to a wind farm near San Jon, New Mexico, will receive a tax break from the Quay County Commission’s approval of industrial revenue bonds. The county may receive more than $84,000 a year in payments in lieu of taxes over the life of the bonds. Much of that funding would support San Jon schools. The plant, which is to be built by Infigen, could produce up to 55 megawatts of power. Construction costs are estimated at $33 million.

Consolidated Solar Now Supplies Home Depot

An Albuquerque-based solar power supply and installation company, Consolidated Solar Technologies, has become the only solar service provider to Home Depot stores throughout New Mexico, southwest Colorado and western Arizona. CST has solar displays at all Home Depot locations in Albuquerque, Farmington, Gallup, Los Lunas, Río Rancho and Santa Fe. CST is in the process of expanding further west into other Home Depot markets.

Founder Institute to Cultivate Santa Fe Entrepreneurship

On Feb. 17, the Founder Institute, a business accelerator program based in Silicon Valley with chapters in 40 countries, held a kickoff event at Warehouse 21 to showcase the kinds of ideas it is bringing to Santa Fe. The institute presented a panel of five technology and creative leaders to talk about mentorship, funding, design, capital and more. The panel included TV producer Lee Zlotoff; Fast Company magazine founder/entrepreneur Alan Webber; SportXast co-founder Molly Cernicek; Nik Seet, founder of SIVI.com and Auditude; and entrepreneur Shawn Patrick, who is helping bring the Founder Institute to Santa Fe to inspire collaboration and local entrepreneurship. The institute will provide teamwork training and other startup services. Applications are being accepted through May 3. The program will launch on May 13.

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To make the courthouse history available to visitors before the building’s rehabilitation is completed, the history team is developing an app that will share historic photos, a description of all the periods of the courthouse history and the stories of the murals and mural artists. Funding to complete the app is being sought from governmental, private and foundation sources, as well as by building advertising partnerships with local museums. The free app will be available for download, easily done with the wi-fi accessible on Taos Plaza. To sponsor, donate or advertise within the app, contact Rachel Prinz: intentiondesign@gmail.com

MIX Santa Fe, an economic and community development initiative that provides entrepreneurial support, has won the coveted Bright Ideas award from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

MIX provides professional development opportunities including marketing, communications, product testing and business development assistance. The initiative hosts open community networking and showcasing events every third Thursday of the month at a variety of locations from 6 to 8 p.m. through November. MIX’s events are designed to explore “creating the Santa Fe we want to live in” through interactive opportunities to launch projects promoting entrepreneurship, neighborhood revitalization, talent development and public policy. Event locations are announced on Facebook and Twitter, through an online newsletter and on the website MIXSantaFe. com. MIX also sponsors an annual startup business plan competition.

MIX is a facilitated through the city of Santa Fe and Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce.

“Santa Fe’s creative workforce is one of the greatest assets we have,” said Mayor Javier Gonzales. “It’s great to see that unlocked by empowering individuals to make connections and bring forward ideas. Creative design and development initiatives allow our community to thrive by cultivating talent.”

Legislation Introduced to Create Statewide Río Grande Trail

Outdoor recreation contributes over $3.8 billion and 47,000 jobs in New Mexico alone.

Last month, a group of bipartisan legislators from across New Mexico introduced legislation to establish the Río Grande Trail, a statewide trail from Colorado to Texas that would connect iconic Rep. Jeff Steinborn, D-Las Cruces (right) introduced the l a n d s c a p e s a n d Río Grande Trail Commission bill with bipartisan support. cultures, create jobs along the route and provide a new high-quality recreation opportunity.

HB 563 would create a commission, made up of stakeholders along the Río Grande, including cities, counties, tribes, federal agencies, conservancy districts and citizens to help define the best routes and reach the necessary agreements to designate a path through the many jurisdictions. The trail would cross land only with the agreement of its owners. The commission would operate, as per state law, under the authority of the Secretary of Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department, who would make the various appointments to the commission.

Currently there are segments of existing trail along the Río Grande including Taos, Elephant Butte, in and around Las Cruces, and the bosque in Albuquerque.

CORRECTION:

In the January 2015 edition of GFT, on page 26, the photo in the Creative Startups article was not identified correctly.

Internationally acclaimed fashion designer Patricia Michaels, who is from Taos Pueblo, designed the model’s silkscreened dress and hand-painted parasol. Michaels, who appeared in a season of Project Runway (coming in second), is known for her innovative creations made from sustainable, earth-friendly Photo © Anna C. Hansen materials.

Green Fire Times • March 2015

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What's Going On! Events / Announcements March 10, 7-9 pm The Art of Food National Hispanic Cultural Center

ALBUQUERQUE March 1-31 Women & Creativity Multiple Locations

Collaborations, performances, workshops and events across disciplines that showcase innovation and leadership of visionary community women. svanchez@gmail.com, www. womenandcreativity.org

March 4, 5:30-7 pm Green Drinks Hotel Andaluz, 125 Second St. NW

Network with people interested in doing business locally, clean energy alternatives and creating sustainable opportunities in our communities. Presenter: Restaurateur Roy Solomon will discuss the Green Jeans Farmery project on Carlisle and Cutler. Presented by the ABQ and Río Rancho Green Chamber. info@nmgreenchamber. com, www.greendrinks.org

March 5-6, 9 am-7 pm Joe Sando Symposium on Pueblo Indian Studies Nativo Lodge 6000 Pan American Freeway N.E.

Presentations by scholars on Pueblo history and life. Presented by the Institute of American Indian Arts. $50/$15 students.

March 6-8 Startup Weekend Women ABQ FatPipe ABQ, 200 Broadway NE

Speakers, coaches, mentors and community entrepreneurial leaders $99. www.up.co/ communities/usa/albuquerque/startupweekend/4659

March 7, 9 am-3 pm Ecological Restoration Project Valle de Oro Natl. Wildlife Refuge

Volunteers can join the ABQ Wildlife Federation working in the South Valley. Clean up debris, dismantle old structures and remove invasive vegetation. rioscial@gmail. com, http://abq.nmwildlife.org/

March 7, 10:30 am NM’s Pueblo Baseball League Indian Pueblo Cultural Center 2401 12th St. NW

Lecture/booksigning by co-authors Herbert Howell and James D. Baker. 866.855.7902, www.indianpueblo.org

March 7, 10-11 am Home Composting Basics Open Space Visitor Center 6500 Coors Blvd. NW

Learn the science, materials and methods of drought-proofing your garden soil.

Free. Registration: 505.897.8831, register@ nmcomposters.org

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Marie Yniguez of Bocadillos will prepare a multi-course pop-up dinner. The evening entertainment will feature the 2015 EKCO poets: Valerie Martínez, Michelle Otero, and Shelle Sánchez, who will share excerpts from their poetic performance as part of Women & Creativity. www.ediblepopup.com

March 14, 1 pm Pueblo Women Leadership Indian Pueblo Cultural Center 2401 12th St. NW

Discussion with former pueblo governors Verna Teller of Isleta and Lela Kaskalla of Nambé. Moderated by U.S. Congresswoman Michell Lujan Grisham. Free. www.indian pueblo.org

March 17, 7-9 pm The Art of Food Westbund West

Lois Ellen Frank of Red Mesa Cuisine and David Sellers of the Street Food Institute will serve a prix fixe menu amongst Westbund West’s collaborative, engaging industrial design, graphic design, furniture design, architecture and landscape architecture. www. ediblepopup.com

March 19, 5:30 pm LaDonna Harris: Indian 101 Indian Pueblo Cultural Center 2401 12th St. NW

Screening of award-winning film followed

by Q&A with Harris and the film’s producer.

Free. www.indianpueblo.org

March 19, 6-8 pm Santolina Community Forum South Valley Multipurpose Center 2008 Larrazolo Rd. SW

The Contra Santolina Working Group says the development would negatively impact the river, bosque, farmers, acequieros, ranchers and communities. https://contrasant olina.wordpress.com, www.gofundme.com/ denysantolina

March 26 19, 1:30 pm Bernalillo County Commission ABQ City Hall, City Council Chambers Santolina Master Plan hearing

March 28, 8 am-4 pm Guadalupe Ruin Excursion Meet at Maxwell Museum

Archeological/cultural tour of Guadalupe Ruin and Village in the Río Puerco valley. $70. 505.277.4405, Maxwell@unm.edu, maxwellmuseum.unm.edu

April 11, 10 am-5 pm Vegetarian Food Festival ABQ Rail Yards, 777 1st St. SW

10 am-12 pm: Tasting ($30/$10 ages 12 & under) General admission: $10. Local restaurants, chefs, cooking demos, seminars, yoga classes, vendors. 505.510.1312, Dean@BlueRiver Productions.com, www.nakedfoodfair.com

Through May 31 El Agua es Vida: Acequias in Northern New Mexico Maxwell Museum of Anthropology,UNM

Groundbreaking, multidisciplinary exhibit.

Free. 505.277.4405, maxwellmuseum.unm.edu

Green Fire Times • March 2015

Daily Our Land, Our Culture, Our Story Indian Pueblo Cultural Center 2401 12th St. NW

Historical overview of the Pueblo world and contemporary artwork and craftsmanship of each of the 19 pueblos. Weekend Native dances. 866.855.7902

SANTA FE

March 1-31 Women & Creativity Multiple Locations

Collaborations, performances, workshops and events across disciplines that showcase innovation and leadership of visionary community women. svanchez@gmail.com, www. womenandcreativity.org

March 1-31 DIY Santa Fe: A Creative Tourism Journey

An immersive cultural arts experience; month-long celebration of workshops and events offered through Santa Fe Creative Tourism, a program of the SF Arts Commission. An opportunity for visitors to learn from experienced artists and artisans while enjoying world-class restaurants, sites and accommodations. 505.792.5746, santafecreative tourism@gmail.com, www.diysantafe.org

March 4, 2-4 pm Home Kitchen Certification WESST-Santa Fe, 3900 Paseo del Sol

An overview of the steps required to be able to legally create food products to sell. Free.

505.474.6556, rperea@wesst.org

March 5, 4-5:30 pm Eldorado/285 Recycles Open House Vista Grande Library, Eldorado

Displays and presentations on recycling and composting, including Adam Schlachter of the SF Solid Waste Management Agency on city and county recycling projects and policies. Eldorado285recycles@mail.com

March 5, 6 pm Stanley Crawford Collected Works Books, 202 Galisteo

The author reads from and signs copies of The Canyon: A Novel.

March 7, 14, 1-3 pm Fruit Tree Pruning Railyard Park Community Room

Horticulturalist/arborist Tracy Neal teaches this 2-part workshop presented by Railyard Stewards. The second day is hands-on. eric@ railyardpark.org

March 8, 11 am NM Legislative Water Issues Collected Works Books, 202 Galisteo

Presentation by river conservationist Steve Harris on the proposed Gila River diversion, watershed restoration and more.

505.988.4226, journeysantafe.com

March 9-10 Banff Mountain Film Festival The Lensic

The world’s best mountain films. Presented by the SF Conservation Trust. $16/ night; $28/two nights. 505.988.1234, www.

TicketsSantaFe.org

March 10, 4-6pm Eldorado/285 Recycles ECIA Conference Room, Eldorado,

Eldorado area recycling advocacy group monthly meeting. All welcome. 505.466.9797, eldorado.285recycles@gmail.com

March 10-May 12, Tues., 5:30-8 pm Climate Masters Class 1413 Second St., Ste. 3

Ten sessions. Learn how to reduce your carbon and water footprint from experts in transportation, energy, conservation, consumption and waste, food and water. $65.

505.820.1696, Eileen@santafewatershed.org

March 12-13 SW Jemez Mtn. Collaborative Forest Restoration Project Workshop SFCC Jemez Rooms

3/12, 8:30 am-5 pm: All-hands monitoring presentations. 3/13, 8:30-2:30: Discussion of 2016 project implementation. Presentations on fire thinning, fire and riparian restoration.

Presenters include Valles Caldera Natl. Preserve, Nature Conservancy, SF Natl. Forest, many others. 505.946.2038, abradley@tnc.org

March 13, 5-7 pm SITE 20/20 Opening SITE Santa Fe

Anniversary exhibition and public programs continue through May 31. 505.989.1199, sitesantafe.org

March 13, 7 pm Round Mountain The Lensic

The folk duo, SF Youth Philharmonia, Turquoise Trail Charter School Chorus and SFUAD Chorus present “Beginnings Where the Endings Be.” A benefit for the SF Youth Symphony. $20/$5 students. 505.988.1234, TicketsSantaFe.org

March 14, 10 am-5 pm; March 15, 10 am-4 pm Santa Fe Home Show SF Convention Center

Northern NM’s only home improvement consumer show. $5. Sponsored by the SF Area Home Builders Association.

505.982.1774, www.sfahba.com

March 14, 4-9 pm Benefit Art Auction/show Warehouse 21, 1614 Paseo de Peralta

Benefits Michael Soto’s family. Michael was killed by a drunk driver earlier this year.

Donations and art contributions welcome.

Sweetsunshyne1@gmail.com

March 14-15, 7 pm The Vagina Monologues SF Women’s Club, 1616 Old Pecos Trail; IAIA, 83 Avan Nu Po Rd.

Eve Ensler’s play. Benefits SF Mtn. Center.

Saturday: $35 adv; Sunday: $25 adv. Tickets: ripetolife.com. Info: www.ripetolife.com/ performances

March 16, 6 pm Living the Ancient Southwest Hotel Santa Fe

SW Seminars lecture by David Grant Noble. $12. Benefits Archaeological Conservancy.

Southwestseminar@aol.com, Southwest Seminars.org

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March 18, 7 pm Noam Chomsky with David Barsamian The Lensic

Lannan Foundation Reading and Conversation. 505.988.1234, TicketsSantaFe.org

March 19-22 Bead Fest Santa Fe SF Convention Center Artists, workshops, expo

March 21, 25 Movies That Matter Jean Cocteau Cinema 418 Montezuma Ave.

Open Sesame: The Story of Seeds (www. opensesamemovie.com). 3/21, 2pm: screening only; 3/25, 6:45 pm: Screening with panel discussion and Q&A. Presented by the SF Farmers’ Market Institute. Weds: $10/$8/$6; Sat: $7/$5/$6. Tickets: 505.466.5528, www. jeancocteaucinema.com/buy-tickets/

March 22, 4-9 pm World Water Day El Museo Cultural

Presentations, performances and displays about water. Film screening of Last Call at the Oasis, about the global water crisis. Art exhibit, info and product tables. To have a table or to volunteer, call 505.231.0221, to display art, call 505.795.4365, general info: 575.770.1228, https://waterawarenessgroup. wordpress.com/events-and-calendar/

March 23 Application Deadline FANTASE Fest 2015

NM Arts grant up to $5,000 will support art light/video/media installations of NM residents for the festival presented by Creative Santa Fe on June 20. Artworks should expand the definition of SF’s unique identity and foster a sense of place. 505.989.9934, info@ creativesantafe.org, www.creativesantafe.org

March 24, 7-9 The Art of Food SF Art Institute

Lois Ellen Frank of Red Mesa Cuisine and Kai Harper of Sugar Nymph’s Bistro will prepare a multicourse menu featuring ancestral New Mexican food with a contemporary twist. View SFAI’s work and hear why food justice is such a critical issue today. www. ediblepopup.com

March 27, 10 am NM Acequia Commission Meeting Bataan Memorial Bldg., Rm. 238

Info: 505.603.2879, molinodelaisla@gmail. com. Agendas: 505.827.4983, www.nmace quiacommission.state.nm.us

March 27, 7-9 pm; March 28, 9 am-5 pm Local Energy Technology Transfer SF Community College

Learn from experts about local, low-cost decentralized energy production. 3/27: lecture ($10); 3/28: workshop ($99), scholarships available. Info: 505.819.3828, Registration: www.carboneconomyseries.com

March 28 9:30 am-5 pm Matsuri 2015 SF Convention Center

Annual Japanese cultural festival presented by Santa Fe Jin. $5/12 & under free.

Santafejin.org

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March 30, 6 pm New Perspectives on Colonialism and Disease Hotel Santa Fe

SW Seminars lecture by Dr. John A. Ware. $12. Benefits Archeological Conservancy.

Southwestseminar@aol.com, Southwest Seminars.org

March 31, 7 pm Arlo Guthrie The Lensic

Folk-music icon. $55/$25. 505.988.1234, TicketsSantaFe.org

Through March 31 City of Santa fe Economic Development Survey

The city’s Economic Development Division is looking for input from businesses. Results will target needs and opportunities. www. santafenm.gov/economic_development

April 1, 7 pm Mary Chapin Carpenter The Lensic

Singer/songwriter. Benefits the Española Valley Humane Society. $55/$25. 505.988.1234, TicketsSantaFe.org

April 2 Business Expo & Job Fair SF Place Mall

12th annual event. One of the largest of its kind in NM. Presented by the SF Chamber of Commerce. 505.988.3279, www.santa fechamber.com

Through April 26, Th.-Sun., 11 am-3 pm Morphing Nature SF Botanical Garden, 715 Cam. Lejo

Students from IAIA and SFUAD have created site-specific sculptures made from recovered plant materials from the garden and found objects. Free. 505.471.9103, santafebotanicalgarden.org

First Saturday of Each Month, 10 am-12 pm Santa Fe Citizens’ Climate Lobby Various Locations

“Creating political will for a livable world” santafe@citizensclimatelobby.org

Saturdays, 8 am-1 pm Santa Fe Farmers’ Market 1607 Paseo de Peralta (& Guadalupe)

Northern NM farmers & ranchers offer fresh greenhouse tomatoes, greens, root veggies, cheese, teas, herbs, spices, honey, baked goods, body care products and much more. www.santafefarmersmarket.com

Through April Virgin of Guadalupe Exhibition Museum of Spanish Colonial Art 750 Camino Lejo, Museum Hill

Retablos, bultos and three-dimensional nichos. Admission: $5./under 16 free/NM residents free on Sunday. 505.982.2226

Become a Site Steward Santa Fe National Forest

Monitor archeological and historical sites on a regular basis for evidence of natural deterioration or vandalism. www.sfnfsitestewards. org

Santa Fe Creative Tourism Workshops, Classes and Experiences http://santafecreativetourism.org/

TAOS

April 15 Application Deadline Chautauqua Program Statewide

March 13-15 Taos Pueblo Artists Winter Showcase Millicent Rogers Museum

3rd annual showcase & sale. 17 artists. 3/13, 5:30-7 pm: Private preview reception. Museum admission fee. 575.758.2462, ext. 212. www.millicentrogers.org

March 19-20 Taos Shortz Film Fest Taos Community Auditorium

150 juried global short films from 34 countries and students from the Institute of American Indian Arts (3/19, 12 pm). Parties, filmmaker’s lounge, viewings. $5$12 per program. anna@taosshortz.com, tasosshortz.com

HERE & THERE

March 5 Opening Iron Tribe 2015 NMHU’s Burris Hall Gallery 903 National Ave., Las Vegas, NM

International group show of sculpture featuring work by Highlands University fine arts professor David Lobdell. Accompanying events run through March 7.

March 10, 7-8:30 pm Jump-Start Your Gardening PEEC Nature Center, Los Alamos

Natali Steinberg will explain how to start from seed indoors. $40/$32 for twopart program. Registration required.

505.662.0460, Programs@PajaritoEEC.org, www.PajaritoEEC.org

March 13-14 Adult Literacy Tutor Training Española Public Library Lucero Center, Española

The NM Humanities Council is looking for individuals who perform living history and/or deliver a talk on an intriguing humanities topic. The free programs take place at nonprofit organizations. Applications: 505.633.7371, jbaca@nmhum.org, www. nmhum.org

Tuesday-Friday, 10 am-1 pm and Saturday Pajarito Environmental Education Center 3540 Orange St., Los Alamos, NM

Nature center and outdoor education programs. Exhibits of flora and fauna of the Pajarito Plateau; herbarium, live amphibians, butterfly and xeric gardens. TuesdaySaturday. Free. 505.662.0460, Programs@ PajaritoEEC.org, www.pajaritoeec.org

Chama Peak Land Alliance Benefit Raffle

Supports responsible land stewardship in the San Juan-Río Grande Watersheds of Colorado and New Mexico. Tickets: $100/$50. Drawing May 1, 2015. www.chamapeak.org/raffle/

april 10 deadline Call for Papers Earth USA 2015

8th Annual International Conference on Architecture and Construction with Earthen Materials. Abstract submission form online closes April 10. Conference will be held at the NM Museum of Art in Santa Fe, Oct. 2-4. Organized by Adobe in Action.

Earthusa.org

“Transforming lives through literacy.” Volunteer opportunity. Río Arriba Adult Literacy Program serves adults in the Española area who read below the 6th grade level.

505.614.5748, raalp2@gmail.com

March 19, 7 pm Wetland Restoration in NM Desert Grasslands PEEC Nature Center 3540 Orange St., Los Alamos

Karla Sartor will discuss birds and plants where habitat is threatened by overgrazing and climate change and how restoration techniques can be applied to the Pajarito Plateau. Free. 505.662.0460, Programs@ PajaritoEEC.org, www.PajaritoEEC.org

March 28, 9 am-4:30 pm Composting Workshop Old County Courthouse, 811 Camino del Pueblo, Bernalillo

Comprehensive workshop. Home composting basics and soil amendment, composting with worms, bucket composting with the Bokashi Method. Sandoval County Extension Service. Free. 505.867.2582, register@nmcomposters.org, sandovalma stergardeners.org

March 28, 10 am-5 pm; March 29, 10 am-4 pm Río Rancho Home and Remodeling Show Santa Ana Star Center

250 booths. Renowned experts in remodeling and home improvement. Free admission until 11 am. $5 for the rest. Kids under 12 free.

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Green Fire Times • March 2015

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