New Mexico is hurtling forward into the future, leaving the past behind. The New Economy is definitely faster than the old one. The one we grew up in. It is easy to forget the lessons learned by our predecessors as the memory of each generation fades. Architecture can endure, but even buildings disappear from both the landscape and our memories – if we forget to teach our children.
It takes time and patience to study the past and discover its meaning in the 21st Century. Kathryn ‘Kit’ Sargeant, a sparkling anthropologist who thought a lot about our local past, died Christmas Eve 2001. A deep memory of our history left. She led studies of old plazas and pueblos and wrote the book with Mary Davis, Shining River, Precious Land, a collection of oral histories of the North Valley of Albuquerque, and a way of life rapidly disappearing as we grow our last crop of houses.
Her friends, neighbors and colleagues know her tireless efforts to rediscover and record the remnants of the Spanish Colonial and Native American settlements throughout the Valley around Albuquerque. This is a past we seldom think about. But she lived with it at home, actively exploring a Pueblo ruin found in her own backyard. She had patience and enthusiasm for the work of discovering the mystery of who these people were and how they lived here in a world before us.
Our modern era is marked by a contempt for the past, for the old ways of doing things. World War I and the Great Depression certainly shattered the promises of the 19th Century. The past failed us. World War II and the explosion of new technology and the race to space convince many that the future can only be better than anything we did before. So why bother? Henry Ford told everyone, “History is bunk.”
Kit Sargeant certainly held onto the past and reminds us that it is worth remembering. The past has a truth. In buildings, our predecessors discovered solutions in adobe that we still use today. Almost no one today tries to build a pueblo or a hacienda, but those enduring buildings reflect a response to culture, climate, materials and technology of their time.
History teaches modesty, when, for example, a student discovers that “primitive” Egyptians built stone pyramids that were not surpassed in scale for over 3000 years – and finally we have our own Big I! That the Anazasi lived and disappeared from the southwest and the fact that we are standing on ruins of our predecessors should give one pause. Who will stand on the ruins of Albuquerque in 500 or a 1000 years? There are no guarantees of success against drought or pride.
From our Western past, there are lessons of form, order, scale and rhythm in buildings, lessons that are still taught in architecture and design schools across the world. But much of our architectural history is now derided as mere style – the Classical, the Gothic, the Baroque, and now even the Modern. We race through Post Modernism and Neo Rationalism to Deconstructivism. Chaos Theory is popular, too.
At the same time, homebuilders here offer Pueblo and Territorial and California Contemporary houses that look oddly alike (as they all have two or three-car garages in front). Much of the similarity is driven by the economy of construction and the technology available. Everyone builds in wood frame. Stucco is available everywhere. People like pitched roofs, and clay tile is a nice upgrade from asphalt shingles. Adobe is unique here in the Southwest, but not economical.
We have invented a new world today based on our technology and cheap water and gasoline. This is a world far beyond the history of 5,000 years of human civilization, where we race farther away from each other than ever before. The communities of the past in the deserts of the Rio Grande Valley or the Jordan River Valley were much more compact and more locally self-sufficient 2,000 years ago or even 500 years ago than they are today. They weren’t sustainable, though. Part of their failure was the lack of technology and the abundance available then and now from someplace else in times of drought or disaster or war.
As New Mexico struggles with today’s recession, and our climate endures a new cycle of drought, our future may look much more like our distant past. Now that we have built our Albuquerque, the challenge may be to retrench and rediscover how our ancestors survived through their difficult times. Hard lessons learned.
Today, in the middle of a new record year, it is time to dust off Kit’s book and research on old plazas and pueblos, and think about the past. The race begins tomorrow, again.
A version of this essay was published in The Albuquerque Tribune in January 2002.
