Werner-Gilchrist House

The Werner-Gilchrist House stands at 202 Cornell Drive Southeast in Albuquerque, in the residential district adjacent to the University of New Mexico that developed in the early decades of the twentieth century. The house is associated with the Werner and Gilchrist families and was built during the period when the Nob Hill and university neighborhoods were filling in with adobe and stuccoed-frame residences, many of them executed in the Pueblo Revival idiom that the university itself was promoting on its adjacent campus.

The dwelling is a vernacular adobe and adapted Pueblo Revival residence. Walls of coursed adobe or adobe-and-frame construction are finished in stuccoed earth tones, with projecting vigas, deep window reveals, low parapets, and recessed entries characteristic of the regional style. The plan is organized around the standard small-house room arrangement of the period, with interior corner fireplaces and exposed beam ceilings consistent with the Pueblo Revival domestic vocabulary. The detailing draws on the same vocabulary that John Gaw Meem and his contemporaries codified in the surrounding campus buildings.

The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 in recognition of its architectural significance as a representative early-twentieth-century Albuquerque adobe residence. It contributes to the documented record of how the Pueblo Revival style spread from formal civic and institutional applications into ordinary residential neighborhoods during the period that the style was being established as the architectural identity of Albuquerque and northern New Mexico generally.

The house is in private ownership and continues in residential use. It is not generally open to the public. Within the broader adobe tradition of New Mexico, the Werner-Gilchrist House represents the small-scale residential expression of Pueblo Revival in Albuquerque, the working-family adaptation of an idiom that elsewhere was being applied to campuses, hotels, and civic buildings. It documents the absorption of the regional adobe vocabulary into the everyday residential fabric of the city in the formative decades of the twentieth century.