The Sky City Visitor’s Center at Acoma Pueblo is situated in the sacred valley of the Acoma people, fifty miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Acoma people trace their ancestry to the ancient Puebloan peoples of Chaco Canyon in Northern New Mexico. Acoma Pueblo sits on a mesa that rises up behind the Visitor’s Center and it is the ceremonial center of the Acoma culture. The Visitor’s Center’s primary purpose is for Acoma people to learn about their culture. It also attracts tourism. The Visitor’s Center was designed by Barbara Felix. The architect faced the challenge of designing a building that needed to be rooted in Acoma culture and be relevant to a contemporary world. She responded to the project in a way that was Critically Regional, as described by Kenneth Frampton. The Sky City Visitor’s Center is Critically Regional in its materiality, massing, and systems integration, but layers of populist imagery also exist.
Kenneth Frampton wrote The Prospects of Critical Regionalism in 1983. He defines critical regionalism as “a dialectical expression. It self-consciously seeks to deconstruct universal modernism in terms of values and images which are locally cultivated, while at the same time adulterating these autochthonous elements with paradigms drawn from alien sources” (149). Barbara Felix exposes modern values that synchronize with contemporary Acoma principles, and adds to them elements with ways of seeing them from a non-Puebloan cultural perspective.
The “high tech adobe walls”, as she refers to them are one example of critical regionalism. Adobe construction is the primary form of construction used atop the pueblo. Adobes are baked mud bricks that are stacked to form walls. Both the Acoma people and the designer valued an efficient construction technique and stacking adobe for a 40,000 sf building would be labor intensive and structurally unsound. So, aerated autoclaved concrete was added to the materials palette of the pueblo vicinity. As seen through the non-Puebloan designer’s lens, the concrete is a massive earthen material with excellent fire resistance properties that can be stacked as masonry units. Aerated autoclave concrete is formed into blocks off-site that can then be transported to the site for installation.
The concrete is covered with either stucco or tabular sandstone. Southwest designers have a history of using veneers that evoke the built environments of non-European cultures to attract tourists with a desire to experience what they perceive to be exotic. Kenneth Frampton warns readers of his text on Critical Regionalism to not confuse his theories meaning with other regionalist intentions:
It is necessary to distinguish at the outset between critical regionalism and the simplistic evocation of a sentimental or ironic vernacular [ . . . ] Its tactical aim is to attain, as economically as possible, a pre-conceived level of gratification in behavioralistic terms. In this regard, the strong affinities of Populism for the rhetorical techniques and imagery of advertising is hardly accidental. (Frampton 149)
Kenneth Frampton sees the use of materials that are not a direct experience of historic cultural values as being rhetorical, rather than dialectic. They are useful as a means to persuade an audience. The inclusion of the materials does not engage different cultural views to reach a shared truth. The experience of the user of the building becomes one comparable to visiting a movie-set or theme park. Theme parks provide intellectually passive entertainment to the visitor and economic profit to the owner.
The use of stucco and stone at the Visitor’s Center is an authentic response to the culture. The adobe is often plastered over on the mesa-top structures to extend the life of the moisture sensitive adobes. The use of tabular sandstone veneers dates back to the ancient Puebloan civilization at Chaco Canyon who used the veneers to contain and conceal structural material. Stucco is a modern variety of plaster. The concrete blocks need to be coated with stucco, brick, stone or vinyl to protect it from the elements.
Another example of critical regionalism can be seen in the building’s glazing. First, Barbara Felix uses a texture laminated by glass around the entrance and lobby areas. This modern glass technology filters light into the Visitor’s Center similar to the way selenite allowed some light into adobe buildings. Selenite is a translucent mineral that covered openings of the Acoman houses. The use of the laminated material is not meant to be a look-alike of selenite, but, rather, to provide an experience that has deeper cultural implications. Kenneth Frampton shares Luis Barragon’s thoughts about the experience of half-light.
Kenneth Frampton includes quotes in his essay from Mexican architect, Luis Barragan who recalls his childhood home, of which there are no pictures. One theme in his work is “his opposition to the invasion of privacy in the modern world” (qtd. in Frampton 152). This opposition includes the over exposed interior of modern buildings. He says:
Architects are forgetting the need of human beings for half-light, the sort of light that imposes a tranquility, in their living rooms as well as their bedroom. About half the glass that is used in so many buildings – homes as wells as offices would have to be removed in order to obtain the quality of light that enables one to live and work in a more concentrated manner. (qtd in Frampton 153)
The Visitor’s Center allows one the Acoman cultural experience of tranquility inside a building. She does so, not by using the material of an older era, but by using a product that is manufactured using current technology. Barbara Felix utilizes square modular panes of glass that are scaled for a large building.
Another use of glazing includes an acid etched stencil of pottery motifs in a hallway that leads to auditorium spaces. Large expanses of industrial glass were a modern development. The element that connects the material to the Acoma culture is a pattern, whose specific meaning is unknown to non-Acoma people, including, even, the architect. The patterned glass takes its motifs from Lucy Lewis’s, a famous Acoman artist’s, pottery.
The inclusion of the etched glass is symbolic, and, therefore, not a direct experience. It does not represent the critical regionalism theory. It is a symbol and a symbol is representational, like a film set or theme park.
In addition to addressing critical regionalism through materiality, Barbara Felix massed the Visitor’s Center in a critical regionalist way. She knew she did not want the large building to look like a big box store such as Wal-Mart. She found a commonality between the formation of geologic slot canyons and the slot canyons formed by the linear housing on the Pueblo. She applied this pattern to the massing of the Visitor’s Center. The Visitor’s Center, then, becomes deeply rooted in the formal logic of the place by connecting to multiple layers of the cultural strata including geology and village planning. The masses do not have the shape of weather worn rocks or adobe. They have the orthogonal volumes characteristic of buildings constructed with contemporary materials.
One final way the Visitor’s Center exemplifies Critical Regionalism is by using systems, where possible, that respond to the climate and culture of its specific location. The aerated autoclaved concrete has the added benefit of having excellent thermal performance. It insulates the building from extreme hot and cold temperatures, like adobe bricks. In the Southwest, the desert has large swings from daytime to nighttime temperature due to low humidity. The adobe houses have the thermal advantage of being close to the earth and so they can passively heat themselves by taking advantage of the heat sink they sit on. Since the Visitor’s Center is much larger than an Acoman house, radiant heating coils installed under the concrete floors are used in the colder months. The modern technological solution is of the same spirit as the Acoma earthen floors in that the floor is a source of heat. Radiant heating is also appropriate for the arid climate of the Southwest because it does not further contribute to drying out the air.
The Visitor’s Center represents Kenneth Frampton’s theory of Critical Regionalism in the majority of instances. The Acoma people have a symbolic language that shows up in their tradition of pottery. Symbolism is not valued within Kenneth Frampton’s theory because, by definition, it is not a direct experience. The inclusion of this symbolic language in the Visitor’s Center is not used in a gratuitous manner and may be appropriate for a building that is instructional of the culture. The inclusion of the cultural motifs may also be motivated by an economic desire as Frampton suggests in his discussion of regional Populist rhetoric.
Works Cited
Frampton, Kenneth. “Prospects for a Critical Regionalism.” Perspecta 20 (1983): 147-162.
Felix, Barbara. Personal Interview. 28 March 2011.
