John Gaw Meem

FACING SOUTHWEST: The Life and Houses of John Gaw Meem (W.W. Norton) is an applauded new book by University of New Mexico professor, Chris Wilson. More Info.... Signed copies of Facing Southwest are available through the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art for $60.

In the early 1920s, while recovering from tuberculosis at the Sunmount Sanitorium in Santa Fe, John Gaw Meem liked to walk along the winding Arroyo Chamiso and breathe in the sunshine.

Santa Fe was a long way from Meem's upbringing in the small city of Pelotas, Brazil, where his father was an Episcopal minister. It was far from the Virginia Military Institute where he earned his civil engineering degree, and even farther from New York City where he helped build the city's vast subway system. But of all those places, Santa Fe, with its year-round sunshine and silent sheltering hills, felt most like home to Meem. And so after recovering from his illness, Meem made the city his permanent home.

From the moment Meem first stepped onto the Santa Fe Plaza, he was captivated by the city's unique architectural mix. The low-slung adobe Palace of the Governors shared space with the French Romanesque-style St. Francis Cathedral and more modern pitched-roof Victorian homes. For Meem, Santa Fe blended history, spirituality and landscape into a balanced architectural whole. As soon as Meem left Sunmount, he set out to make his own architectural vision fit into the composition.

It was about the same time that John D. Rockefeller Jr. also discovered Santa Fe. In 1930, Rockefeller proposed to finance a center for anthropological studies in the city. He launched an architectural competition that solicited designs for the center from architects throughout the United States. Meem didn't have a degree in architecture, but he emerged as the winner for a design that best suited Santa Fe's mountains landscape and multicultural influences.

More than seventy years later, the 5,000-square-foot, adobe Pueblo Revival-style structure that Meem designed as the director's residence of the Laboratory of Anthropology is home to the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art. The museum is a showcase for the most comprehensive collection of Spanish colonial art and material culture of its kind, as well as for Meem's distinctive architectural style.

During a career that spanned more than thirty years, Meem worked to bring the historic architecture of the region into the early twentieth-century mainstream. Meem made his mark by reinterpreting New Mexico's centuries-old Hispanic and Native American architectural traditions. The resulting Spanish colonial, or Pueblo Revival, style would be Meem's greatest architectural accomplishment.

"I think my father's hallmark was his sense of proportion," says Meem's daughter, Nancy Meem Wirth, a member of the board of directors of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society. "He had this wonderful sense of somehow reinterpreting history and staying true to it."

Indeed, nearly all of Meem's designs are rooted in the traditional residential and ecclesiastical buildings that he saw in Hispanic villages throughout northern New Mexico. From the La Fonda hotel in downtown Santa Fe, to the University of New Mexico, where he designed 35 major buildings, to the Fuller Lodge in Los Alamos and Cristo Rey Church in Santa Fe, Meem's architectural influence is firmly established throughout New Mexico. The modern art deco Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center that Meem designed in 1934 earned him a national architecture award and is a further testament to his architectural genius.

But it is the historic structure and homelike setting of Meem's Camino Lejo masterpiece that set a most appropriate stage for the Society's extraordinary Spanish colonial art collections. Meem designed the building primarily as a place for public entertainment. A series of spacious rooms allow for easy circulation of large numbers of people while providing easy access to the outdoors and spectacular mountain views. And as in all of Meem's Pueblo Revival-style structures, the house is highlighted by detailed handmade appointments such as doors, cupboards, fireplace grills, bookshelves and radiator screens.

Besides providing an intimate and regionally relevant ambience for the Society's collections, the Meem building represents Meem's personal history with the Society. Meem and his wife Faith both were active members of the Society from its incorporation in 1929, and John Meem served on the Society's first Exhibitions Committee. During the next sixty years, the couple made major donations to the collections, including one gift of thirty-four important New Mexican textiles in 1962. Two years after Meem's death in 1983, Faith Meem made another major donation to the Society of 147 significant bultos and retablos.

After Faith Meem's death in 1989, Nancy Meem Wirth returned to Santa Fe from California, where she had lived for 30 years. She moved into the stately adobe-and-stone family home that Meem built in 1938, and like her parents, she became an active member of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society. Now, as the Society moves closer to establishing a museum in the building that her father so beautifully conceived, Wirth says her father's architectural legacy and his love for traditional Hispanic art have come full circle.

"I'm sure it would give my father the greatest pleasure to know that he had created a beautiful architectural space, which was to evolve into a home for an organization and a collection he so loved and admired," she says.

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