Volume 6 Number 2
January 1967

Milton D. Lowenstein, A.I.A.

The traditional desert architecture of the Southwest consists of buildings which help men not merely to endure strenuous conditions, but to love them.

The architect has only to study imaginatively the carefully sited and oriented adobe buildings and plazas of the Indians for inspiration and instruction to "re-present" in his own designs some of the Indians’ traditional attitudes of fortitude, dignity, and reasonableness in the face of adversity; or the cool enclosed patios and cloisters of haciendas and missions built by the Spanish for "revival" of their traditional closely-knit, culturally autonomous and pious community life.

Many of the Indians’ traditions go back to ways no longer comprehensible to them or to us. But reverence for the past helps to keep welded together the remnants of a civilization all but lost among alien conquerors. Some of the traditions are founded on aspects of ecology-culture relations that still prevail. The orientation, siting, size and disposition of the functional elements of the pueblos follow traditions that have validity for the contemporary architect.

Usually, the southwest comer of a pueblo (e.g. San Ildefonso) is open to the prevailing winds and is an example of traditions, which if followed, would have a salutary effect on our community planning. When the aliens first appeared they were not forcibly resisted, but their structures were placed outside the confines of the pueblo, as was the church at San Ildefonso. This peaceful solution of an irksome problem is traditional with the Indians of the Southwest and has implications for the planning of a "greater" Phoenix trying to assimilate industry in an essentially residential area.

To the Indians who had been building bee-hive pueblos before the coming of Europeans, and had learned to roof areas 40 to 50 feet in diameter, the raising of church walls to 30 and 35 feet was not so much a problem of technique as it was one of perceptual logic. The volume enclosed was much larger than for immediate needs; its purpose lay beyond the comprehension of the Indian who had been accustomed to buildings just high enough to walk into. The floor plan may have been obvious; a series of relationships between sanctuary, chancel nave, entry, and the site. Also, the transverse clerestory formed by the difference in height between apse and nave seemed necessary to light the altar.

But why the vast space over-head where absolutely nothing occurred? How could the Indian who looked into the bowels of the earth for the spiritual comfort afforded by departed ancestors accept, along with a strange ritual, the concept of another life outside the darkness of a high ceiling?

It also must have been difficult for the outsiders from Spain to comprehend a people held strongly together by no bonds of a common ambition or by government, but only by old traditions founded upon an agrarian life in the Southwest’s and regions. Without a territorial chief to help them unite in the face of enemies (and, therefore, secure from the threat of being betrayed by the defection of a leader as happened in Mexico), and ready to abandon in the face of danger their durably built dwellings, the Indian community way of life was preserved too through the centuries. Only Santa Fe, which embodied the regulations of a European, Phillip II, was an exception to the Indian community layout.

Life in those days seems to us to have been a grim ordeal with death or torture imminent. But architectural research has revealed in the old homes an ingenuity and sensitivity to esthetic values that are rare today. Then, man’s ever-importunate demand for beauty had to be satisfied with very limited means and preempted the place occupied by contemporary diversions.

The viga-pierced protective masses of adobe, and the dark uncertainly defined interiors with their scale, proportions, textural qualities, color and induced kinesthetic effects, gave those exquisite perceptual experiences which man has always enjoyed in the architecture of the past. Built with a small variety of materials, they were applied throughout the building, to exteriors and interiors alike. The stone and adobe blocks used by the Spanish, or the rammed earth of the Indian homes, and the wooden beams that supported the roofs, were adapted also to furnishing the rooms. Stone or massive wooden benches under the high small windows served as much for a platform for sharpshooters as for a seat where the mistress of the house could sew in the dim light, when even the patio was unsafe.

A desert, with its vast scale, small variety of building materials and relatively uniform climate, seems to offer the widest range of possibilities to the architect. An and region, of all environments, is perhaps the least restrictive in its demands. From the temporary hut of rags and reeds for an Iranian nomad, to the solid fortress walls of stone and brick of the Thar Desert, the different kinds of structures in which man can be comfortable exceed that of any other part of the earth.

Actually, the challenge to the contemporary architect does not consist in making correct choices among a number of different "Styles," materials and esthetic forms. The challenge derives from the absence of any desire to choose, and the absence of any extraordinary problems of shelter to solve! The thoughtful architect finds his constructive inclinations overwhelmed by inchoate circumstances, and his greatest difficulties arise in trying to mitigate similar feelings of intimidation in a sensitive client.

The basic secret to successful desert architecture lies in the solution to the problems of scale. The temptation is strong to reach for the unapproachable horizon or the unattainable sky with a Tower of Babel or Cape Canaveral. Earth-conditioned architecture should never try to pierce the "scale barrier." The architect has no frame of neighboring buildings or a community or a city marked out by familiar landmarks. He has nothing on which to depend for absolute values. He must create as a musician would who is denied the use of notes with fixed pitches with which to compose. And like such a musician, the architect must rely on the parameters of human perceptions, and structure them in accordance with his own instinctive needs.

Once upon a time the community needs for survival here in a hostile environment dominated the design of home, of both the natives and later gold-seekers from Castile. The essential requirements for a home in the Southwest: arrangement and thickness of outer walls, location of any openings, provisions for living within an enclosed patio, protected accesses to fresh water and a place for worship, were determined by decisions made at a tribal meeting or council table. Where a few resources have to be shared by everyone, individual enterprise has to serve the community welfare.

Modern homes must also play a protective role, but from dangers which are more insidious than those of early times in the Southwest. The most ominous threats are those brought into the home by the dwellers themselves. The hurts to minds and hearts need to be assuaged for people struggling daily with the random petty purposes inherent to contemporary enterprises. The senses, rarely courted as they long to be by what is beautiful, are, instead, assaulted by the incessant importuning of the instruments with which an affluent society may yet destroy itself. So far, the role of the community in resolving the difficulties has been negligible. Parks, playgrounds, cultural centers and recreational facilities, rarely enter into tract-house developments.

To emulate Indian architecture should not, of course, involve the architect with problems of copying the old architectonic details. A contribution to the modern scene would include an interpretation of the social values immanent in the traditional designs. Inherent to pueblo planning is the cultural autonomy granted a small community. Its independence is further supported by its isolation in the desert where the principal architectural resource is the cooperative effort of the community members.

Would not the dispersal in small groups of the Southwest’s traditional desert people also meet the conditions of an age where rapid transportation and communication make dispersion, rather than concentration, an agent of cultural growth, especially when it needs the support of scattered or low density energy resources such as the sun?

It is possible that contemporary minority groups of the Southwest may welcome "segregation" as a prerequisite for community-oriented activities. If assured of status derived from assertion of cultural integrity, the community could help reverse the current trend toward ever bigger cities where a concomittant, to the elimination of scale in buildings, is the destruction of real meaning in human existence. Among the consequences of the community culture-module might be more sanguine hopes than now prevail, that social justice is attainable through majority rule.

To each of us, the ways of our ancestors and of the Indians, their devotion to ideals and the resistance of each group to any deviation from a revered tradition, may mean something different. The aspirations common to all of them pervade the religious zeal of friar-priests, the Indians’ autonomous theocratic communities, avoidance of armed strife and the integration of survival techniques with desert architecture. It is a heritage which makes survival worthwhile.