Santa Fe Modern
Santa Fe Modern is the first-ever survey of modernist and contemporary architecture and interiors in the richly layered architectural history of Santa Fe. The book is a reconsideration of long-held stereotypes of Santa Fe “style” and reveals that the high desert landscape is an ideal setting for bold, abstracted forms of modernist houses. Beautifully photographed and elegantly written, Santa Fe Modern is a coffee table book that is just at home on your bedside table. The book is the final third of my “modern” trilogy that includes the best-selling Marfa Modern and Texas Made/Texas Modern.
Helen Thompson Santa Fe Modern – Editorial Reviews
Wallpaper.com
Santa Fe Modern: Contemporary Design in the High Desert
This new tome by Monacelli celebrates ‘Santa Fe’s dramatic mountain landscape, endless views, clear light, pueblo-style adobe architecture, and vibrant history of indigenous cultures.’ Written by author Helen Thompson, the book looks at the series of modern designs that, along with its beautifully arid surrounds, define the landscapes of Santa Fe. The striking works within include the Santa Fe Residence by Studio DuBois pictured here, created in 2005 for contemporary art collectors Jeanne and Mickey Klein.
Art permeates the book, appearing in nearly every space in every house, such that Santa Fe Modern, more than anything, is about providing lessons in how to live with art — about how to design houses that are suited to displaying art. Jeanne and Michael Klein’s “About Light and Time” house, designed by architect Mark DuBois, features Kiki Smith’s Tears sculpture positioned in a corner where two structural glass walls meet (second spread); the integration of art and architecture is such that nature is seen through the glass walls but also through the art. Other houses use more traditional means — paintings on walls, adobe and otherwise — but many of the spartan spaces resemble galleries as much as they do domestic environments. The pervasiveness of art in these houses says as much about the people who live in them as about Thompson’s curated selection, as well as about the high-desert city they all call home.
Ardent Market
Contemporary Design in the High Desert. First survey of modernist and contemporary architecture and interiors in the richly layered architectural history of Santa Fe. Santa Fe Modern reveals the high desert landscape as an ideal setting for bold, abstracted forms of modernist houses. Wide swaths of glass, deep-set portals, long porches, and courtyards allow vistas, color, and light to become integral parts of the very being of a house, emboldening a way to experience a personal connection to the desert landscape.
The architects featured draw from the New Mexican architectural heritage—they use ancient materials such as adobe in combination with steel and glass, and they apply this language to the proportions and demands exacted by today’s world. The houses they have designed are confident examples of architecture that is particular to the New Mexico landscape and climate, and yet simultaneously evoke the rigorous expressions of modernism. The vigor and the allure of modern art and architecture hearten each other in a way that is visible and exciting, and this book demonstrates the synergistic relationship between art, architecture, and the land.
Modern Luxury Interiors
Texas native Helen Thompson explores the modernist and contemporary architecture and interiors of Santa Fe in her newest tome, Santa Fe Modern: Contemporary Design in the High Desert (Monacelli). Paired with Austin-based Casey Dunn’s (@caseycdunn) photography, Santa Fe Modern is the first to illustrate how architectural ideas that are both new and ancient have redefined the city and its culture with 20 private homes from architects including Lake|Flato, Lawrence Speck, Specht Architects, Studio DuBois, Trey Jordan and Ralph Ridgeway. Hear all about it at Thompson’s virtual presentation on Oct. 5 during Fall Design Week, where signed copies of the book will be available on-site for purchase.
Santa Fe Modern reveals the high desert landscape as an ideal setting for bold, abstracted forms of modernist houses. Wide swaths of glass, deep-set portals, long porches, and courtyards allow vistas, color, and light to become integral parts of the very being of a house, emboldening a way to experience a personal connection to the desert landscape. The architects featured draw from the New Mexican architectural heritage–they use ancient materials such as adobe in combination with steel and glass, and they apply this language to the proportions and demands exacted by today’s world. The houses they have designed are confident examples of architecture that is particular to the New Mexico landscape and climate, and yet simultaneously evoke the rigorous expressions of modernism. The vigor and the allure of modern art and architecture hearten each other in a way that is visible and exciting, and this book demonstrates the synergistic relationship between art, architecture, and the land.
The writer Helen Thompson had been a lifelong visitor to Santa Fe, but when she arrived at Georgia O’Keeffe’s home at Ghost Ranch 30 years ago, “I was shocked,” Thompson says. “Everything there was modern: Her furniture was modern; her light fixtures were modern; her art, of course, was modern. And in this rustic setting, the landscape is so powerful, it was all so elemental. That shock stayed with me.”
It was an experience, Thompson says, that led her to the conclusion that Santa Fe, long understood as a city filled with vernacular, decorative architecture, was ripe for a rethinking. “I kept wondering, why does something like that look so right here?” she says. “The landscape is so distinctive, and so not-modern, and yet these very precise pieces of furniture looked so right.”
Now, with her new book Santa Fe Modern: Contemporary Design in the High Desert (Monacelli, $50), Thompson has cracked the code. “Modern ideas are site-specific, and tied into what’s right for the landscape and the environment,” she says. Naturally, she continues, this conceptual framework works well in a place like New Mexico, where the dramatic horizon meets an even more dramatic sky.
In publishing Santa Fe Modern, Thompson hopes to “reset the popular notion we’ve had about Santa Fe for the last 30 or 40 years, thanks to Ralph Lauren and other marketing geniuses, that it’s ‘cute’ and ‘cozy.’”
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