Rail Park and Site Santa Fe
The not-so-recent architectural addition to the City Different, the Railyard Park and the Site Santa Fe building, works by Allied Architecture and Shop architects, respectively, are located on the southern boundary of the the Rail Road District. The park and Site Santa Fe are quite an inversion of space and form from the the City’s other, well known Architecture, popularized by Sharon Woods in her classic “Santa Fe Style”. The park and Site Santa Fe’s modernity supports the railyard development not as representation of the past, but by imaging the future with a new spatial experience for the denizens of this historic and so lovely of a city.
Indeed, the vision behind the railyard district involved many user groups that resulted pedestrian connectivity, shared community space, and a collective sense of history, replete with references to the the once important railroad. For it was the railroad that brought more a fashionable architectural style, the Territorial Style, with its classical references of pediments and brick coping, along with eastern goods and building materials to this Spanish enclave.
Why I am fascinated with the rail park is its use of geometry, a linear park that continues the rail track theme from the districts' northern half, which by the way, is a lovely public space with a collection of shops, a farmers market, plaza space and even an end-of-the-line rail station. The Rail Park isn’t’ planned as part of the street grid; when viewed from an automobile, the rail park angles away from the road and ignores the busy intersection of Cerrillos Road and Guadalupe Street. Because the park angles away from the street grid to maintain its alliance with the rail road, it feels unrelated to car while driving. But when walking, biking or running, its linear planning makes perfect sense and has many nodal pockets of activities for locals and tourists alike. The success of this development is in the strength of its commitment to people and sense of place.
It’s the park and Site Santa Fe that has attracted my attention, namely because of their novel use of space, as both the rail park and Site Santa Fe work together, in harmony so to speak. Site Santa Fe is simple in adornment and geometry, except its rather daring entry yard wall, that, unlike the traditional Santa Fe Style courtyard wall, is a diaphanous metal lattice that pulls up at its acutely angled corner, revealing its glassy curtain wall of the museum entry beyond. This one architectural element, the corner entry, has intrigued me for many years until its raison d’etre become clearer in my imagination: The Great Utopian Constructivist work of Vladimir Tatlin. His work, Corner Relief, 1915, is a revolutionary sculpture because it leveraged a room corner to “re-contextualize” the viewer’s experience. The Site Santa Fe entry, instead of being seen frontally, suggests the viewer concentrate on the corner of the building where it becomes part of the sculpture (wall) itself, and an indexical sign of the institution. In the case of Site Santa Fe, a contemporary art museum, the building corner rises to represent an architectural Avant Garde, like the art work within the building. Site Santa Fe sits at the corner of a well trafficked intersection and shoulders the rail park to its east, making the pedestrian welcome while walking along the park and its dramatic corner opens to the farmers market to the north. By leveraging the corner, the building makes two presentations of itself at the same time, much like Tatlin’s Corner Relief.
For this admirer of architectural and urban design, this museum and the rail park prove that architecture functions best with supporting contextual development. When architecture, as building, works with the architecture of park (context), the richness of both is elevated to a palpable perceptive statement for a human being to experience. Architecture and place in this context, is something to see, something to behold, something to experience.