Historic Adobe Houses of Taos, New Mexico

Taos sits at the foot of the southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains, seventy miles north of Santa Fe and a thousand feet higher. The old village was laid out around its plaza in the late eighteenth century, when Spanish settlers pushed up the Río Grande del Norte and built their small placita houses along Ledoux Street and Kit Carson Road. Three miles to the north stands Taos Pueblo, the multistory adobe village that has been continuously occupied for more than a thousand years and which, more than any single building, taught American architects what an earthen wall could do.

Taos is an arts colony almost by accident. In 1898 the painters Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, on a sketching trip down from Denver, broke a wagon wheel just north of the plaza; while one walked the remaining miles to Taos for repairs, both saw the light against the mountains and never left. By 1915 they had founded the Taos Society of Artists with eight other painters — Couse, Sharp, Berninghaus, Dunton, Higgins, Ufer, Hennings, and Phillips — and the small adobe houses they bought along Ledoux Street and Kit Carson Road became, for a generation, the studios where American landscape painting was reinvented around the Pueblo. Most of those houses are still standing.

The third Taos — after the Pueblo and the painters — is the Hispanic village of plazuelas and small Spanish Colonial houses that the writers found and the patrons collected. Mabel Dodge Luhan’s enormous adobe compound east of town drew D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, and Aldous Huxley in succession through the 1920s and 1930s. The town that resulted — adobe, art, and Pueblo all at once — is what the catalog documents here.