The master plan for the New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT) includes not only the 300,000sf NMDOT office facility but also a multi-modal transportation center, cultural institutions, office buildings, retail, residential, and public space. After setting the conceptual framework for the community, we worked exclusively with the master planning firm, Cooper Robertson of New York to execute the large scale idea.
With the master plan complete, the challenge of the new NMDOT facility in Santa Fe is to create a large modern, highly efficient and sustainable office building that is respectful to the culture and context of historic Santa Fe and its traditional adobe architecture. By organizing the NMDOT building around internal communities and structures, we have achieved such a duality and created a facility that will enamor both the NMDOT users as well as the people and visitors of Santa Fe while positioning the organization for the future.
The NMDOT facility is a very simple diagram, two office bar buildings connected by a building which houses most of the communal functions. Though this diagram forms a dramatically skewed "H" in plan, the building may be thought of as an armadillo, with a protective outer adobe-like skin that responds to and protects the facility from the elements and that evokes much of the "look" of historic Santa Fe. Juxtaposed to the outer shell is the protected inwardly focused contemporary glass facades of the interior courtyards (kivas) and terraces which allow the facility to be inundated with light and air while creating zones of circulation and gathering around these very courtyards.
It is this juxtaposition of the protected and the unprotected, the opaque and the transparent, the extroverted and the introverted, the traditional and the modern that creates a building that truly reflects, without simulating, the duality that can be found in every Georgia O'Keefe painting and that is modern day Santa Fe.