Exhibition Reviews

"Facing Southwest: The Houses of John Gaw Meem." Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0011.
     Temporary exhibition, Feb. 27–May 31, 2002. 1,150 sq. ft. Chris Wilson, Stella de Sa Rego, and Beth Sibergleit, curators.
     "Facing Southwest": The Life and Houses of John Gaw Meem. By Chris Wilson with photographs by Robert Reck. (New York: Norton, 2002. 160 pp. $60.00, ISBN 0-393-73067-0.)

In the fall of 1908 William Tight, the third president of the University of New Mexico (UNM), redesigned a structurally failing Romanesque-style building on the campus of the young university. Tight slathered adobe over the brickwork and attached wooden vigas (rough-hewn beams) to the exterior, creating one of the earliest examples of a self-consciously regional architecture in New Mexico. Few in the state's dominant Anglo power structure embraced Tight's vernacular vision, and he was soon fired in part for his unorthodox design. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, with the rise of tourism and regionalism and an influx of federal money into the West, the Spanish-Pueblo revival in architecture (later known as the Santa Fe style) began to flourish. Early experiments with regional vernacular often involved only kitschy, stage-set-like incorporations of Spanish design elements, such as canales (roof drains), carved wooden beams, and the rounded adobe masses of Pueblo Indian architecture. It was left to the architect John Gaw Meem, whose career stretched from the 1920s to the 1950s, to refine and elaborate the emerging regional design tradition for New Mexico's serious public and private architecture, with designs that affirmed regional cultural diversity, history, and sense of place. The UNM campus showcases many of his enduring edifices, including Zimmerman Library, which houses the Center for Southwest Research. The library recently presented "Facing Southwest," an exhibition tracing Meem's architectural imprint. Produced in conjunction with the publication of a new book about Meem-designed homes, the exhibition of the same title was funded by the John Gaw Meem Endowment.	1
Stepping out of the bright sun and behind the cool thick walls of Zimmerman Library, the visitor entered a one-room exhibition next to the university's main archive, which houses the Meem papers. The exhibition contained recent and historic photographs, original blueprints, accompanying architectural plans drawn by the Albuquerque architect George Clayton Pearl, evocative architectural drawings from the library's collection, and, at the center, two large Meem-designed wooden doors—one an original and the other a re-creation—as well as display cases containing the design source books that inspired him.	2
The casual researcher or student could easily have missed this exhibition. A closer look, however, pulled the viewer into the realm of cultural landscape history and recommended a careful examination. Spanish-Pueblo and territorial styles of architecture, so ubiquitous in New Mexico that they are often taken for granted, are easily misconstrued as timeless expressions of tradition. This exhibition encouraged visitors to think of the construction of cultural landscapes and architecture as a historical process filled with intention. With a presentation that focused on the quotidian historical artifact—the house—the curators suggested penetrating questions. How can one architect shape our ways of seeing and inhabiting places? How does modern architecture continue to respond to place-based cultural traditions and unique regional history? What are the negotiations that architects, historians, and all of us make between the forms and ideas of the past and the pressures and desires of the present?	. . .