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GOAL
The goal of this project is to look at the details of historic buildings in the Southwest and then translate those
details to a modern Cultural Art Museum. Your students will take a walking tour and make sketches of the forms, shapes, symbols and details they find on old
buildings. They will research the history of these elements and then incorporate these details into a new design for a Cultural Art Museum for your town or city.
CLIENT The mayor has asked your class to design a Cultural Art Museum for the city. As you take a walking tour of a historic district in your town or city have your
class look for signs or symbols of our Southwest culture. Your class will then choose an existing building as the site for the new Cultural Art Museum. The existing building will then be
documented with plan and elevation drawings. These plans and elevations will then be pushed and pulled, organized and reorganized, until
they have been successfully redesigned to accommodate the needs of the new Cultural Art Museum. As the new Cultural Art Museum, this building
will stand as a symbol commemorating the spirit of our Southwest culture.
back to top CONCEPTS
MATERIALS
- clipboards for walking tour
- drawing paper
- tracing paper
- flair pens
- colored markers
- crayons
- colored pencils
- oil pastels
VOCABULARY
ORNAMENTATION: |
decoration derived from geometry or nature.
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SYMBOLISM: |
designs which have meaning to a particular cultural group.
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back to top
HISTORY One Southwest architect who is remembered for his love of the earth adobe architecture of New Mexico is John
Gaw Meem. He is known for his joy of copying, transcribing and repeating the symbols from the past and adapting them to the present.
John Gaw Meem was born in Pelatas, Brazil, in 1884. He was trained and worked as an engineer. In the 1920s, Meem became ill with turberculosis and moved to New Mexico to recover.
When John Gaw Meem got off the train that brought him to Lamy, New Mexico in 1920, he was enchanted by the canopy of crystal-clear stars above his head. Since no
one was there to meet him to take him to Santa Fe, his new home, he stayed in a boarding house near the train station. As he pulled up the covers to protect himself
from the chill of night, he saw "stars under his blanket," bits of sparking electricity which produced a second array of heavenly lights. This was a sign to him that he was
indeed in "the land of enchantment" and that he had made an excellent choice of a place to recuperate from tuberculosis. On this night through the magic of the
stars, John Gaw Meem united his spirit with that of New Mexico. John Gaw Meem became a preserver of very old Pueblo and Spanish colonial styles. He looked at what the land
offered and what had gone before, then he responded with a compassion for the earth, using the same value systems that had been used in the Southwest for thousands of years. He developed a love and
understanding for the local past and copied and adapted it for the present. Meem felt that regionalism, the use of old forms, and the traditional simplicity of Pueblo and Spanish structures was
an appropriate expression of contemporary Southwest architecture. "The ancient shapes are modern," he contended, "because the fundamental forms of a time
can best be expressed as a language native to the region." The environment is an important element in creating the architecture of New Mexico; the Native Americans have known this for years.
back to top
PROGRAM
Wrought Iron Light Fixture |
Take a walking tour in an historic area of your town or city. While you walk, look at the architecture that surrounds you and watch for
the signs you see that remind you of the past, of the Southwest culture. Look for symbols etched in lintels that span entryways, or details on windows, columns, or gates. Details
may also include such architectural elements as doors, doorknobs, wrought iron gates, corbels, light fixtures, windows, columns, and ornamentation or decoration. Have your class
sketch these symbols and details in their sketchbooks, or photograph them. Select symbols that you and your students have observed on your walking tour. These
symbols will then be investigated in order to learn their history and derivation: Where did they come from and how did they get here? They may have come from a
myth, a story told by a grandfather to his grandchildren, or they may have come from a spiritual tradition practiced in the various Southwest
cultures. The symbols may have come from daily chores such as the harvest (corn motif). They may have come from the designs seen in nature, or even from geometry.
The symbols chosen by your class which your class chooses will then be reinterpreted into the design of
each architectural element or detail selected for the Cultural Art Museum. The symbols you choose may "dance across the surface" as ornament on the museum, or become completely "integrated" into the
structure of an architectural element. In either case, the newly designed details will take on a new power, a symbolic meaning derived directly from our cultural past; one that will completely mesh the
symbol with the detail and the detail with the overall museum design.The students will then draw plans, elevations, and section drawings to describe the new design for the
Cultural Art Museum. Have your students develop drawings that will explain the architectural details in terms of their relationship within the overall museum design. back to top
For additional evaluation of your students' projects, see the EVALUATION FORM AND RATING SCALE
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