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Rating: 
Summary: An Essential Text on Preservation and Design Review
Review: The editiorial reviews available on this fine publication only hint at its value to preservationists, architects, and anyone involved with architectural design review boards. Wilson provides a concise history of Santa Fe and the cross-cultural influences that have shaped its architecture. Most importantly, the author examines the influence that early 20th century historic preservation philosophies had in formalizing what has ultimately become the "Santa Fe Sytle." This is essential material for anyone interested in examining how historic preservation can impact, both positively and negatively, contemporary architectural aesthetics.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The transformation of Santa Fe from a primitive village at the northern edge of the Spanish empire into one of the United States's most sophisticated art and tourist centers is nothing short of remarkable. The first Anglo-Americans who visited the town in the nineteenth century were struck by the ramshackle appearance and economic lassitude of the place (more than one described it as "a dilapidated brick kiln"). If you have visited Santa Fe in recent years, you cannot fail to have been impressed (whether favorably or unfavorably) by the profusion of expensive restaurants, elegant hotels, and chic art galleries that now surround the old Spanish plaza. Wilson makes a genuine attempt to trace Santa Fe's architectural and cultural metamorphosis and to identify the generations of settlers, preservationists, historians, archaeologists, artists, architects, philanthropists, civic boosters, social activists, politicians, and ordinary citizens who combined to bring it about. But his effort is deeply flawed by a political agenda that ultimately forced me to give up on the book.Wilson has no use for Republicans or the Republican party. He is entitled to his opinions, of course, but I am at a loss to understand why they should be expressed so often and so gratuitously in a book that purports to be a scholarly study of Santa Fe's architectural and cultural history. The book is published by the University of New Mexico Press (which presumably was funded by and seeks to serve Republicans as well as Democrats and independents), and the cover identifies Wilson as an adjunct professor at the university. A few examples will demonstrate the author's slant. On page 9 he states that President Ronald Reagan "led a reallocation of resources" in the 1980's "from the lower and middle classes to the wealthy." On page 158, he states that the Civil Rights movement arose out of the "political repression of McCarthyism and the assimilationist tendencies of the Eisenhower years." On page 164 he asserts that Republicans have since 1980 used affirmative action "to drive a wedge between working-class Whites and the Democratic party." All of this may be true, or not true (or partly true and partly false), but its relevance to the historical and cultural development of Santa Fe is hard to discern. It betrays a partisanship that is sure to alienate many readers, and it detracts from the positive qualities of the book. A few passages where historical fact is sacrificed (or at least neglected) gave me an uneasy feeling about the book's reliability. On page 181, for example, Wilson writes: "Following the approval of statehood by congress [sic], Santa Fe staged a magnificent reenactment of the Spanish reconquest [of 1692] as part of the 1911 Fourth of July celebration." I puzzled over this sentence, because I thought I recalled that New Mexico had not become a state until 1912. A little checking confirmed my recollection: On June 20, 1910, President William Howard Taft signed an act of Congress authorizing New Mexico to call a state constitutional convention. The convention met in Santa Fe on October 3, 1910, and drafted a constitution that was approved by voters on January 21, 1911. On January 6, 1912, Taft signed a proclamation admitting New Mexico to statehood. Wilson's statement may not be incorrect, but it is at least misleading. Congress acted in 1910 and statehood came in 1912, even if the reenactment occurred in 1911. Taft, of course, was a Republican.
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