Place // Albuquerque, NM

>Albuquerque, New Mexico
Founded: 1706
Population: 528,000 (inc) 857,000 (metro)
Claims to Fame: Bugs Bunny, Aliens, Nuclear Tests & Route 66

[Is there a Bugs TomTom voice?]

Albuquerque marks the westward transition from the flat grassy plains of Oklahoma and Texas to the undulating desert topography and low-lying brush vegetation by which Southwestern cities are commonly identified. The city's character is derived from its heritage as a Spanish, and later Mexican, military garrison, and is expressed most clearly in numerous examples of Pueblo Revival style architecture.

[Transit Station. The city has been a hub of SW travel since its origin.]

[Quirky bungalow in a historic district.]

What you immediately notice about desert cities is the bolder use of color on urban edifice. Three factors contribute to this phenomenon of intervention: the lack of canopy vegetation (i.e. dense leaf deciduous trees), the use adobe stucco as the primary building material, and abundant, unobstructed sunlight. The sparsity of localized visual cues creates the impression of the building against the distant landscape rather than neighboring objects. Flanking the urban core of Albuquerque are mountainous ridges that offer little in the way of chromatic variation; as a result, bright pastels are popular color choices, as are deeper reds and purples. [The works of Ricardo Legorreta and Luis Barragan - both Mexican - are better examples of how color can bring visual energy to desert architecture.] Adobe stucco is a great surface on which to apply color because it's naturally neutral and the surface texture accepts paint and disperses natural light.

[Townhomes]

[Don't worry, the town ain't radioactive...]

As far as tourist sites go, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, the only congressionally-chartered museum of its type, is worth checking out. New Mexico, of course, is well-known as the location of nuclear weapons development and testing during to WW2 (See: The Los Alamos Laboratory and The Trinity Test). The museum's exhibits describe the history of the implementation of nuclear science towards facets of our everyday life, from military to medicine to energy.

The University of New Mexico is also an important component of the urban fabric to the northeast of downtown; Antoine Predock, a former student of the University whose practice is based in Albuquerque, designed the recently-completed School of Architecture building, shown below.  

[UNM School of Architecture. Almost applied here.]

[Pueblo Brutal?]

[The desert]