Location
Santa Fe, NM
Awards
2010 AIA Albuquerque – Merit Award
2008 State of New Mexico Heritage Preservation Award
– Urban Design within an Historic Context
2007 AIA New Mexico – Citation of Merit Award
The renovation of the Sears-Hansen Building preserves and highlights its original heavy timber structure. At the interior, old paint and plaster were sandblasted from surfaces to expose textures in the exposed wood and concrete. Skylights were placed over the columns on the 20’x20′ grid, revealing a new relationships between the contrasting, crisp gallery interiors and the existing rough-sawn structure.
New entries on the east side of the building were deeply recessed to emphasize threshold into the original masonry envelope, while a portal carved out of the west facade provides a shared communal area for the building’s tenants. Concrete stairs, planters, and ramps on the exterior of the building provide urban pedestrian zones linking from the street into the adjacent Railyard development.
The stucco color is derived from a boxcar red, and is modified to appear to shift in response to varying conditions of natural light.