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...extent that anyone can define it, Santa Fe style is largely a matter of shape and shading -- the colors of sagebrush and ashes, watery blues and rose and clay. The sand-castle city of its birth is a town without right angles, where whitewashed walls and doorways and fireplaces bend and curve, hand shaped from clay. Sometimes, as translated by non-Hispanic designers like Architect David Kellen, the style becomes an "abstraction of a Mexican type of design...
...history, a lot of family and no sharp edges. Of all the U.S.'s Latino landscapes, perhaps the most haunting is in New Mexico, where Native American, Spanish and eastern-Anglo sensibilities have boiled together in the Southwest sun for the past four centuries. The so- called Santa Fe look, romanced into the mainstream by Ralph Lauren, has turned into the hottest design fad in years. "People naturally want to return to the earth," explains Rachel Elizondo, owner of Santa Fe's Storyteller gallery, a mecca for decorators. "A clay pot built by hand in natural colors is a living...
Natives see a certain irony in the sudden cachet of their homespun style. "Originally people built adobe homes, which are really mud huts, because the materials were cheap and available," explains Santa Fe Architect Michael Bodelson, 33. "It was a vernacular architecture, low technology." These days, he notes in amusement, only the rich can afford to build adobe homes, since authentic construction can add about 15% to 20% to the cost of a comparable wood-frame or brick home...
...everyone is enamored of the style: Architecture Professor Frank Dimster, at the University of Southern California, calls the Santa Fe look "cinema architecture," an ultimately escapist style designed to comfort rather than challenge. Even some of its champions view its proliferation with alarm. "It's become too much a style," says Kellen, who has begun to shy away from using the Southwestern aesthetic. "A lot of people who don't understand it that well are making a cartoon...
...view jointly at the University of Miami's Lowe Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum and Art Center in Coral Gables, Fla. Curated by Jane Livingston and John Beardsley, the exhibit has already been seen in Houston and Washington; after Miami, through September 1989, it will travel to Santa Fe, Los Angeles and New York City. It is by far the most detailed and serious effort ever made to survey the current painting and sculpture of Hispanic Americans...