Preservation Where it Matters, Design Freedom Where it Doesn't

There is a quiet truth about Santa Fe that almost no one says out loud, perhaps because it asks us to let go of a well-established illusion:

Santa Fe has a real historic identity, but it does not cover the whole city. It never did. Our insistence on pretending otherwise has created a kind of architectural confusion that serves neither beauty nor affordability nor the lived reality of the place.

Walk through the Historic Districts—the Eastside, Don Gaspar, Westside-Guadalupe—and you feel something coherent. The massing, the materials, the narrow streets, the shadows cast by low walls and irregular parapets. These places are not perfect, but they are authentic. They contain the remnants of a story that can still be protected.

But step outside those districts and the story changes. The built environment becomes a collage: strip malls, 1980s commercial boxes, stucco subdivisions, faux-adobe apartments, Territorial Revival hybrids, and now a wave of contemporary infill. This is not a failure. It is what happens when a city grows over time. The result is not coherent, and it cannot realistically be preserved as a single aesthetic system.

Yet Santa Fe continues to regulate much of the city as if its historic architectural language should apply everywhere. Parapets, earth-tone palettes, faux vigas, and massing rules meant to evoke a past that is not present in most of the city. These requirements do not necessarily produce beauty or authenticity. Too often, they produce something else: buildings designed to satisfy a checklist. Compliance artifacts.

Other cities with meaningful historic cores do not ask their entire cities to imitate them. Charleston does not require 18th-century piazzas in its suburbs. New Orleans does not mandate French Quarter balconies in Gentilly. Boston does not require Beacon Hill brickwork in Dorchester. Preservation works in those places because it is focused. It protects what is real, rather than asking the rest of the city to pretend it belongs to another time.

Santa Fe's attempt to extend its historic aesthetic across the entire city is increasingly difficult to justify. It can burden housing production with requirements that have little to do with affordability. It can force architects to imitate forms that were never meant to be universal. And, ironically, it can dilute the very thing preservation is meant to protect: the authenticity of the Historic Districts themselves.

The answer, however, is not to abandon standards outside those districts. The rest of Santa Fe deserves something better than either unchecked development or manufactured historicism. Buildings should still be judged for their scale, proportion, relationship to the street, landscape, public realm, and the character of their surroundings. Good urban design matters everywhere.

But good design does not have to mean historical imitation.

The Historic Districts remain extraordinary. They are coherent, defensible, and worthy of careful protection. They deserve traditional materials, rigorous review, and the full attention of preservation governance. They are where Santa Fe's historic architectural identity is most tangible.

The rest of the city deserves something different: the freedom to evolve.

We can preserve what is truly historic without requiring the entire city to reenact a past that does not belong to most of its built environment. We can honor authenticity without manufacturing imitation. We can allow contemporary architecture to be contemporary, provided it is thoughtful, well designed, and respectful of its setting.

That is not a radical idea. It is a more disciplined understanding of preservation: protect what is genuinely historic, and allow the rest of the city to become what it will be.

Santa Fe does not need to choose between its past and its future. It simply needs to give each one the space—and the rules—that allow it to be itself.