New Mexican Architectural Styles

Pueblo: This Spanish word for town has a more complex meaning in New Mexico architecture. A Pueblo is an energy efficient system of maximizing building shap, orientation and materials.

Hacienda: a building structure made of connected rooms that create a central miniature plaza.

Placita: this is a small patio-like area formed by two or more walls of the home.

Revival Styles of Northern New Mexico

Territorial Style: The mid-1800's brought a combination of traditional flat-roofed adobe construction with provincial Greek Revival details such as white porch posts with capitals, moldings, triangular pedimented lintels over doors and windows, and fired brick cornices capping walls. Intorduced along with this style were glass windows, milled lumber, fired brick,  the central-hallway house plan, pitched roofs. Usually the stucture was adobe walls with a few fired brickdetails.

Pueblo Spanish Revival style: About 1905, builders began to revive the flat-roofed, stuccoed cubic forms of the Pueblo and Spanish colonial traditions. Sometimes called the Pueblo Revival, the style draws terraced, multi-story forms from Pueblo villages, and portales, corbels, corner fireplaces, and mission towers from the Spanish Colonial architecture of the state. Therfore, this is more accurately called the Pueblo Spanish revival.

Territorial Revival Style: Beginning in the early 1930's architects revived the territorial era vocabulary of flat-roofed, stuccoed forms with white, classical details and red brick cornices atop walls. Used primarily in house design and at the state capitol complex, the revival omits the pitched roofs that were part of the mid-1800's territorial style.