The Plazas of New Mexico (review)

Plazas are open spaces typically surrounded by buildings. As an architectural form they have been part of urban settlements from Uruk to Tenochtitlán, and part of the morphology of towns and cities whether Roman, medieval, Renaissance, or modern. In the Americas plazas have been associated with place making since aboriginal times, and they have been imported and elaborated across landscapes of the New World by Hispanic and American cultures. In New Mexico, perhaps more than in any other place in the United States, plazas have been integral to the spatial and social organization of communities for Native Pueblo peoples, Hispanic—both Spanish and Mexican—cultures, and Anglo-Americans. The plaza, although varied by type, form, and landscape, is especially common in this southwestern U.S. state where differences can be pronounced, in part, because of the historic and contemporary interactions of Native, Hispanic, and Anglo peoples.

The Plazas of New Mexico is arguably the most ambitious volume ever to document, assess, and investigate this unit of spatial geography for a single region of the United States. The editors insist that, while part of the goal of the book is to give order to our understanding of the plaza in New Mexico’s past, it is also about how we can learn from the form to enrich our present and future. Conceived as a contribution to the “reurbanization movement” (4) that directs attention back to the pedestrian street and public space of cities and away from the auto-oriented development that seems to govern modern lives, The Plazas of New Mexico deepens our understanding of public space through historical and cultural inspection, and thereby fosters dynamic design and planning grounded in that understanding.

The book has its genesis in a decade-long project to document the plazas of the state. This enterprise, directed by Chris Wilson and Stefanos Polyzoides through the Historic Preservation and Regionalism Program of the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico, conducted seminars that engaged many students, one of whom, José Zelaya, became responsible for documentary drawings in the work. The project also expanded to include acclaimed New Mexico social documentary photographer Miguel Gandert, who contributes dozens of contemporary images to the project. Part of the strength of this book is the successful collaboration of committed scholars, creative photographers, and design professionals—three disciplines that do not always make for a smooth compatibility.

The Plazas of New Mexico is a weighty volume, handsomely designed, and imaginatively assembled in four complementary parts—“History,” “Cultural Narratives,” “Place Making,” and “Communities, Plazas, Squares.” There is a useful appendix of thumbnail figure/ground plans of plaza communities, notes to the seven chapter contributions, a select bibliography, and an index. Critical to the success of the volume is the large number of illustrations, including stunning historical photographs, striking contemporary images, color reproductions of selected graphics and design plans, and extremely useful drawings and architectural elevations, all of which enhance the larger story of plazas from past to present.

In part I, “History,” cultural landscape historian Chris Wilson serves up a masterful narrative that explores the three traditions of plaza place making in New Mexico: Puebloan village center places, Spanish and Mexican plazas, and Anglo-American courthouse squares. Wilson deftly navigates the reader through the varied cultural meanings of these plaza spaces, sharpening and illuminating our view of how the built forms were created and evolved among the social groups and across the geography of the state. We learn, for example, that the Puebloan and Spanish and Mexican spaces of northern, central, and southern New Mexico, while created through cultural order, were grounded in a spiritual and domestic way of life that contrasts with the speculative geometry of American squares, dictated as they were by their adaptation to the gridiron of streets and railway alignments characteristic...