San Francisco de Asis, the adobe church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico.
Data from Historic American Building Survey (HABS), 1934
Computer model aerial view looking southeast.
Computer model aerial view looking southwest.
Computer model looking southeast
Photo of original adobe caretakers house montaged from several snapshots.
Ranchos de Taos has many strange tales--and mysteries, including ufo sightings. Computer model/photoshop.
Artist have always come to the church in Ranchos de Taos.
HABS elevations of the church.
HABS floor plan of the church. Note that the lines are not parallel. Walls of the nave are 5 feet thick.
Snow on adobe means a busy time of re-mudding the exterior walls and parapets in the spring.
Pablo Quintana (Dr. Mud, as he is affectionately known to Taosenos), here supervises the yearly re-mudding of the church, using techniques that are timeless.
When I moved from Denver to New Mexico in 1990, I first lived in an ancient adobe house about a block east of the old adobe church in Ranchos de Taos. Georgia O'Keefe had made the building famous with her paintings of it. Living so close, I grew very fond of this building and consider it to be in the "best of all-time architecture" catagory. One night through word of mouth in the artist hood, we found ourselves in this candle-lit church listening to a concert of Oaxacan musicians performing pre-contact music on pre-contact musical instruments. In the context of the 1772 building, the music transported us back to the time when Native Americans and Europeans first made contact. The original building construction crew must have been Taos Indians working with the Catholic priest.
This is my first computer 3-D model built on a Macintosh in the summer of 1990. Source for the data is the 1934 Historic American Building Survey (HABS).