Rehabilitating A National Historic Landmark: The Story of the National Park Service’s Old Santa Fe Trail Building
/SALON EL ZAGUAN with Charles Vickrey and Flynn Larson, National Park Service
Rehabilitating A National Historic Landmark:
The Story of the National Park Service’s Old Santa Fe Trail Building
ABOUT THE SALON TALK
The Old Santa Fe Trail Building is a New Deal Era adobe building constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Constructed of 280,000 adobe bricks, the National Park Service Regional Headquarters adapts local building tradition to the Spanish Pueblo Revival style which was popularized in the 1930s in northern New Mexico and adopted by building NPS architect Cecil Doty. The building is unique in its expression of organic forms with sculptural massing and locally inspired textures and pigment that blend into the landscape. The Spanish Colonial style is adopted throughout the interior in decorative elements with CCC-crafted wood furnishings, and light fixtures to connect local forms with daily NPS functions. Some changes throughout the twentieth century, however, negatively impacted the building causing several technical issues. In 2018, the National Historic Landmark underwent a rehabilitation project to solve these issues, addressing architectural elements throughout to allow the building to function as originally intended. The project required the team to adapt to the unique needs of an adobe building, reversing years of water damage to protect the original adobe bricks. In this presentation, we will share the Old Santa Fe Trail Building’s journey from construction to rehabilitation, exploring its history and revealing its transformation from 1936 to today.
Find more information on the renovations in the Santa Fe New Mexican articles:
Park Service at work on iconic Santa Fe building, Paul Weideman, Jan. 12, 2019
Depression-era adobe office building to undergo renovations, Tripp Stelnicki, April 15, 2017
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Flynn Larson is a Masters in historic preservation student at Goucher College and is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is an SCA-Americorps intern with the National Park Service’s Intermountain Historic Preservation Services program working with historic structures throughout Regions 6, 7, and 8 of the National Park System. She is focused on the preservation of historic structures and landscapes throughout America’s national parks. She is also a member of the Historic Districts Review Board in Santa Fe.
Charles Vickrey started his career with the National Park Service (NPS) in February 1991 as a Drafter for the Design and Engineering Division for the Southwest Regional Office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He served in temporary positions with the NPS in subsequent years, until receiving his degree in Architecture in 1997 from the University of New Mexico. In 1998, Charles restarted his NPS career serving as a Project Inspector on the construction of the Northwest New Mexico Visitor Center and Multi-agency Center in Grants, New Mexico for El Malpais National Monument. A year later, he joined the Intermountain Regional Office (formerly the Southwest Regional Office) of the NPS, based at the Old Santa Fe Trial Building. In early 2000, Charles served in a term position for the Regional Contracting Office in Santa Fe. In 2002 he moved from contracting to the Design and Engineering Division as an Architect. In 2018 Charles assumed the role as senior Architect for the Santa Fe Office.
Charles has spent much of his career working out of the Old Santa Fe Trail Building, with only brief absences to work in other parks such as Big Bend National Park, Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site, Hubble Trading Post National Historic Site and Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. Charles has worked on small and large architectural projects from Arkansas to Montana for the National Park Service for over 30 years.