Documenting New Mexico's Modern Legacy

A statewide archive of the buildings, architects, and movements that shaped New Mexico's modernist identity, researched and written by people who care about getting it right.

Researchers Resources

Tall office building with multiple floors and a grid of windows, situated in an urban area during dusk or evening.
Tall office building with multiple floors and a grid of windows, situated in an urban area during dusk or evening.

NM Modernism Wiki

Category: Modernist architecture in New Mexico

NM Museum of Art

History: Modernism in New
Mexico Art

ABQ Library Archive

Digital newspaper archive for NM and ABQ
can be browsed online

Special Collections Library

Library of research
collections on NM history

NM Preservation Division

Preserving New Mexico's
historic treasures

A painting of a steam train traveling through a landscape with rolling green hills and a body of water in the foreground, under a blue sky.

Modernism at O’Keeffe

Past Exhibition: Modernism Made in New Mexico

A framed abstract geometric artwork with overlapping rectangular shapes and circular elements connected by lines, in shades of gray, black, and white.

NM Modern Fine Art

Artists who were active in New Mexico (ca. 1915-1960)

NM Architecture Mag

Publication of the New
Mexico Chapter of the AIA

ABQ Library Archive

Digital newspaper archive for NM and ABQ
can be browsed online

In The Press:

Written or Photographed by New Mexico Modern

Mid-century modern house with a flat roof, large glass windows, a brick wall, and a gravel driveway, surrounded by green trees and lawn.

DOCOMOMO Article by Nick Roth

This article traces the legacy of Don P. Schlegel, an MIT-trained modernist whose regional approach to design and decades of leadership at the University of New Mexico shaped both New Mexico’s architectural education and its modernist built environment.

A Sense of Place: Don Schlegel, FAIA

Display of vintage ads from Four Hills Village, Lot 5, 1964, with two black-and-white newspaper advertisements and a smartphone in the center showing a digital version of one ad, featuring a man in a suit and hat.

Series of Articles and Galleries

A historian and photographer move into a mid-century golf course neighborhood in Albuquerque to research and document its architecture and social history. A retelling of their discoveries.

Four Hills Village Project

Interior view of a spacious building with a central circular water fountain surrounded by plants, chairs, and tables. The ceiling is made of wooden panels with a skylight overhead.

Photographed by Kimberli Roth

Sunbelt Modern Part One: Inside the Weese-designed First Plaza Building in downtown Albuquerque, NM, written for docomomo by local historian and founder of the former Modern Albuquerque initiative, Thea Haver.

Inside The First Plaza Building

Regional resources and case studies

Modern Albquerque

Explore

New Mexico Case Studies worth Knowing About

Black and white photo of a modern rectangular office building labeled 'Simms Building' with a rough-textured exterior and numerous windows. In the foreground, a traditional adobe-style sign for a shop selling Indian and Mexican goods features a wooden cross and a small sculpture of a crucifix.
Black and white photo of a modern rectangular office building labeled 'Simms Building' with a rough-textured exterior and numerous windows. In the foreground, a traditional adobe-style sign for a shop selling Indian and Mexican goods features a wooden cross and a small sculpture of a crucifix.

Simms Building

1954 Flatow and Moore

Flatow and Moore’s design, a dramatic glass and stone slab standing upon a low-slung plinth, became the tallest structure in Albuquerque when it opened. It also marked a radically new architectural approach in the city’s skyline.

Beyond its innovative architectural design, the Simms Building was also very technologically advanced. It employed a heat-pump system combined with radiant panel heating and cooling. Large pipes descended into the earth at varying depths. Water ran through these pipes into the ground, where it was either cooled or heated and then pulled back into the building to provide temperature control.

Read The Case Study
Two black and white photos showing a geodesic dome structure under construction in a hillside landscape with hills and sparse vegetation.

Manera Nueva

1967-73 Steve Baer

Manera Nueva, Spanish for “new way,” rose in Placitas, New Mexico as a community built on anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist ideals. The domes that made up this settlement – called “zomes” – were constructed from found materials.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

1971 Ted Luna, AIA

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Angel Fire, New Mexico, is one of the state’s most distinctive works of modernist architecture, a sculptural white chapel built in 1971 overlooking the Moreno Valley. Full story and photos below.

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