
Is that the post-apocalyptic set of Terminator 4 or just another cyborg building pretending to be sleepy, old Santa Fe?
At the Thursday, June 19 press preview for the
7th international SITE Santa Fe Biennial art exhibition
, Santa Fe City Councilor and Mayor Pro Tem Rebecca Wurzburger told the assembled local and international press and a host of visiting VIPs and dignitaries that, in Santa Fe, “it’s hard for us to embrace the new…but we do it anyway.”
It was an ambiguous remark, considering there were no crotchety constituents in need of placating within sight of SITE, but also a strangely accurate one.
Santa Feans are particularly willing to embrace the new when it makes us look old. Santa Fe has always been keen on the mortifying technologies of the façade—from synthetic, earth tone stucco and fake viga extensions to fauxdobe frontage on downtown brick and luxury hotels mocked up as modest pueblos. But the current barrage of downtown construction achieves a new level of technological excellence in pursuit of maintaining “Santa Fe style.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
, the death-dealing cyborg with a hint of soul, describes himself as “living tissue over metal endoskeleton” in the original film of the franchise. The new
, the convention center and the residential development at Marcy Street and Lincoln Avenue, across the street from City Hall, now share a curious machine-kinship with the post-apocalyptic, servo-powered assassin.
But don’t mistake form for function; each project is valuable and more or less benevolent. The new museum will be a central jewel in New Mexico’s unique crown of state-sponsored museums, the convention center is long overdue and downtown residences are critical to the city’s development. It’s also nothing new. What is new is the metal-boned mass of these projects, the pre-fabbed steel I-beams, joists and struts, expertly formed to articulate an approximation of the grace earned by building with adobe.
Just as the Terminator’s “living tissue,” which covers his cybernetic insides, enables him to pass for human, a veneer-carved insulation and earthy stucco allows casual viewers to imagine the stacked mud bricks of yesteryear, rather than the chorus of cables and contemporary construction encased within.
As far as construction techniques go, these are good choices. These buildings are being built cost-effectively, with minimal waste and maximized energy efficiencies, especially the convention center. However, the artifice maintained under a ploy of authenticity remains troubling.
It is part of an identity disorder that has chased Santa Fe since it first began to create its own mythology in the beginning of the last century. Wurzburger’s further remarks at SITE’s press preview lauded Santa Fe’s
designation as a UNESCO “creative city”
and invited the assembled international cast to consider attending Santa Fe’s upcoming conference on creative tourism. Wurzburger championed the UNESCO designation and is one of the more progressive councilors for economic development and cultural initiatives, so her promotion makes sense. But nothing could be less creative than having our major public construction projects be simulacra of a manufactured past.
Arguments about whether to build in a manner that celebrates the present or in a way that re-establishes a state that may in fact never have actually existed at any given time, to paraphrase the 19th century French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, are also not new; these are the conversations that presaged modernism. The question before Santa Fe now isn’t whether we should desperately cling to the past at all cost, throwing our eggs into a century-old marketing scheme that is in the throes of diminishing returns, or whether we should sell out, à la Manhattan, to gross, overglazed ego-projects by elite starchitects. Rather, the question is whether we can embrace a truly new approach that reflects the singular nature of a contemporary Santa Fe and brokers an expression of our traditional values into a partnership with our global status as a center for arts and science.
The Marcy and Lincoln residential project represents the worst of Santa Fe’s desperation to cling to its past; the building’s restoration has absolutely destroyed it. It is, at publication, still held aloft by jacks while its cyborg innards are assembled and it is made over, $6-million-man style, to be better, faster, stronger than before, while maintaining a frantic, almost superstitious, reconstruction of its historic former existence. All three downtown cyborg buildings could have represented the vanguard of a City Different expression of creative identity into the next century. Not replication of the global fads notable from Brooklyn to Dubai, and not the (sadly more acceptable in Santa Fe) homogenized Western-tract sensibilities of Phoenix and Denver, but something born from an examination of what is truly new and possible because of Santa Fe’s rare combination of elements.
Instead, we are apparently content to accept what is new only when it is pragmatically dictated and to wrap it, like cowed peasants, inside layers of comforting lies masked as tradition. As evidenced by the intuitive and fast grasp of these issues by artists from several nations participating in the SITE Biennial, Santa Fe has reached a point where its obsessive image consciousness is taken seriously only by its own self-enchanted inhabitants. It is time for Santa Fe to stop tentatively and secretly “embracing the new” in occasional and opportunistic bursts and to, instead, define the new on its own terms.
Food for thought: Terminator 4, currently shooting in New Mexico, is subtitled
.