Only in New Mexico: An Architectural History of the University of New Mexico. The First Century, 1889-1989

Only in New Mexico: An Architectural History of the University of New Mexico. The First Century, 1889-1989 by Hooker, Van Dorn. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780826321350.

The campus of the University of New Mexico, blending New Mexico’s characteristic Pueblo style architecture with regionally sensitive modernist forms, is unique among American college campuses, most of which have been modeled on European architectural styles. Since UNM’s early days its leaders have wanted the state’s flagship university to be a distinctly New Mexican place, what one writer called a “pueblo on the mesa.” Now Van Dorn Hooker, who served for many years as the university architect, has written a history of the architecture and planning of this beautiful campus. UNM’s third president, William George Tight, fell in love with New Mexico in the late nineteenth century. His visionary appreciation of the creative genius of Hispanic and Pueblo architects, artists, and craftsmen led him to hire an architect to remodel UNM’s first building along the lines of the mission churches that dominate New Mexico’s Indian pueblos. This decision set the tone. In the mid twentieth century many UNM buildings were constructed in the Pueblo style, some of them designed by John Gaw Meem, the greatest practitioner of Pueblo-style architecture. Hooker’s account will appeal to anyone who has ever studied, taught, or worked at UNM. But its significance goes far beyond nostalgia. New Mexico was still a territory when the university was founded. And because the founding of UNM coincided with the arrival of the railroad in New Mexico, the growth of the university coincides with Albuquerque’s transition from small town to city as well as with the territory’s attainment of statehood and the changes it has experienced in the course of the twentieth century. To read Hooker’s inside account of the ways decisions were made, buildings were funded, and the university interacted with federal, state, and local governments and events is to understand the ways institutions grow and change and the interaction of wise planning with the inevitability of unintended consequences. Winner of the New Mexico Heritage Preservation Award from the State Office of Cultural Affairs, 2001.