The idea of the plaza in human history is born and developed under a number of different impulses: an expression of the power of the state to define a place for public life, through a singular, monumental architectural enclosure. Alternately, an expression of agreement among free people to contribute their individual buildings to define a place for their shared use, a Commons that none of them could have formed by themselves. And finally, an expression of a profound connection to the cosmos; a place that through its shape and location suggests a particular relationship of a people to nature.

Inherent in the form of the plaza are a multitude of human associations, most common among them, confirming, sustaining or denying the power of the state, framing repeating events and rituals, and enabling random and unexpected encounters. More than anything else, human life has been enriched by the plaza as a public place where private behavior is discouraged and the bonds of commonality are forged.

The design of plazas in New Mexico has three historic points of departure: The first is connected to the native people of the Southwest. Their interest was in generating plazas in the center of their Villages (pueblos in Spanish) that connected their settlements to the forces of the cosmos, represented in the form of the celestial sphere and the mountainous horizon. Such plazas both accommodated public festivals and rituals and symbolized the spiritual connections of its inhabitants to the divine. This kind of plaza became both the crucible of daily life and the axis mundi of the pueblo people. It is still actively used and considered this way today.

The second point of departure for plaza design begins with the Laws of the Indies promulgated by King Philip II of Spain in 1673. Some understand this body of planning legislation to be a brilliant administrative adaptation of Roman Mediterranean urbanist precedents. Others consider it a clever, low-resistance adaptation to native American Village-forming practices. In either case, the Laws of the Indies instructed the Spanish Conquerors to build towns that were framed around a plaza.

The Hispanic plaza was meant to support religious, civic and commercial life and to accommodate the daily needs of its citizens for human association and contact, for fun and for profit. Such plazas have represented since the 17th century, and still represent, the sense of community and the locus of public life that is the shared bond among people relatively free to associate and to pursue their destiny in the New World.

The third and most recent kind of plaza design is connected to the Anglo-American expansion across North America in the 19th century. These plazas were associated with the process of colonizing the North American continent through acquisitive and commercial impulses. The instrument of choice, and the cheapest means for getting people to the west was the train. The transaction that most often got them there was a real estate sale. At the intersection between the train station and the relentless orthogonal grid of the lot speculators was a point of arrival, a platted but invisible town square. This kind of public plaza was formally defined less as the link to the cosmos or the presence of the power and culture of a distant empire, and much more as the abstract and vague desire to found a new settlement for profit.

The railroad town plaza was a point of beginning, the promise of a settlement based on the values of the American republic, a blank canvas to be painted, not an object of pre-existing, deep cultural associations. The reason why so few of these town squares are known or celebrated today is because so few of the railroad towns accomplished the status of a mature community. Most of these are plazas of immense private ambition and limited public accomplishment. Yet, they still, by and large, serve the same civic, religious and social purposes of their Hispanic and Native American cousins. The fact is, that because they carry so much less cultural weight, they have been more easily displaced and diminished as place and as memory of history and culture by the current ravages of Southwestern sprawl.

New Mexico, one of the poorest and most rural states of the Union, has this very profound urbanist lesson to offer in the present: There are many traditional, beautiful and meaningful places all around us. They need to be seen first, and then deciphered; The public process of rebuilding them and expanding their architectural form and social presence must be initiated; The professional knowledge and confidence must be gained to re introduce them as live types in the design of new Neighborhoods and towns by endowing them both with a worthy physical form and an appropriate symbolic and functional presence.

Plaza Types
There are plazas of various types. Some were founded to be the center of a Village, such as the Plaza at Taos Pueblo. Some were formed as a defensible agricultural Hamlet, such as the Plaza del Cerro in Chimayo. And most were conceived as the centers of vibrant towns, such as the Plaza in Santa Fe.

Planned Proportions / Geometric Distortions
Plazas vary in their dimensions from about 160 feet face to face minimum per side in Mesilla to about 800 feet face to face maximum per side in the original configuration of the plaza in Ranchos de Taos. Most plazas are square or rectangular. Some are slightly distorted. The native plazas are typically irregular. A few plazas are of a completely different shape, such as the triangular plaza in the Village of La Union.

Sectional Configuration
Plazas vary in their sectional definition depending on their formality and civic importance. Some plazas like Santa Fe are surrounded by buildings of one, two and three stories in height. The less developed and prominent a plaza, the more it is surrounded by its foundation buildings that are typically one story in height. Some plazas, such as Las Vegas were at times conceived more grandly, and have individual buildings that rise as high as five stories. Arcades in most plazas are intermittent suggesting both the loose authority of an initial founding document and an even looser local municipal discipline over time.

Street Patterns (Traffic and Parking)
Plazas were born with a loose right-of-way dedicated to the circulation of vehicles, animals and people that was not differentiated from the space of the plaza itself. Over time the right-of-ways were paved and ordered to serve typical current pedestrian, parking and traffic needs. Some plazas such as the one located in the center of the Village of San Jose del Vado, remain unpaved.

Block & Lot Size / Building Types
Because most plazas grew organically, their urban order emerges through the incremental addition of their building types, not the a priori design of the city blocks that frame them. Individual buildings were placed around the plaza to accommodate initial social needs, and Villages or towns then grew around them. Typically plazas possess one block per side and very rarely two, such as in the case of the plaza in Socorro. Particularly fascinating are the building types that line Hamlet plazas that are immediately adjacent to agricultural land, such as the case of LA Union. Their urban side is designed around strictly urban frontage elements, such as arcades, porches and garden walls. Their back yards are configured as places for the accommodation of animals and agricultural implements. The gravity- flooded fields lie just beyond.

Building Fabric & Monuments
Churches and civic buildings are often located on plazas and more than often dominate their form. Some of the most beautiful examples of plazas preserve most of their modest foundation buildings. The expressive simplicity of designs such as Monticello is based on a variety of building types from house, to store to church, subtly differentiated within a uniform typological and stylistic order.

The Issue of Style: Unity vs. Variety, Material & Color
Most plazas are designed within the rules of the relatively silent regional traditional languages, adobe revival, territorial revival, etc. They are constructed in nontraditional materials and colored in various shades of adobe brown. The propensity is to unify and to enlarge the architectural scale and the symbolic presence of the entire plaza ensemble.

Landscape
The landscape of plazas depends on their location and use. Agricultural Hamlet plazas, such as Chimayo, are often dedicated to agriculture. Urban plazas were born as open, unpaved multi use places and can be fully appreciated in this kind of form in early photographs and drawings. The process of Americanization of the southwest brought with it ideals related to civilized urban landscape, and most plazas were transformed beginning in the late nineteenth century into squares, public places with significant park and garden components. Best examples of such urban landscape are to be found in Albuquerque and Las Vegas, NM.

Scale
The tendency of much recent design is to unify and homogenize the design of buildings around plazas and to render their landscape into a cacophony of small, unrelated, partial and stylistically diverse. The result is the reduction of the scale of these plazas and, despite the wishes of all involved, the diminishing of their civic importance. The best examples of mature, evolved plazas speak of variety in massing and uniformity and simplicity in the design of their landscape. This attitude narrowly reflects the social and symbolic use of plazas. Simple landscape is suited to multiple uses of urban space. Varied size and massing speaks of functional accommodation and the private needs of individual buildings.

Connections to Urban Surroundings
Plazas are seamlessly connected to their surroundings. Their building fabric is often an elaboration on the common Village or town fabric surrounding them. Their public space and landscape is always an expansion of the order and scale of all other streets and public space. This high connectedness allows plazas to accommodate a variety of civic, religious and ritual events repeating from year to year. They enable and represent the common urban experience inherent in the word community.

Accommodation to Nature
Native plazas are connected to the horizon and the sky, through which they derive their essential relationship to nature. The plaza at the Santo Domingo Pueblo is typical of this kind of placement. Plazas are also designed to take advantage of the natural slope of the ground reason for reasons both symbolic and pragmatic. Sloping plazas convey rainwater more efficiently to natural waterways, while allowing for the placement of religious buildings on the uphill or elevated sites. An excellent case of that kind of plaza would be the original designs for Santa Fe and Las Vegas, NM. In both cases, the churches are not to be found outside the plaza.

The Plaza in Time: Growth & Change
We are drawn to the purity of original plazas because they so forcefully convey the initial intentions of plaza and town founders. Principles at the sources executed by people of limited means convey a level of poetry that makes our current civilization look sorry. We are equally drawn to the complexity and vitality of plazas that have gone through cycles of transformation, both enriching and diminishing original intentions.

The New Urbanism studies the history of places, engages precedent and believes in design as a means of building that is both meaningful in the present, and continuous and consistent with our inherited cultural traditions. The plazas of New Mexico are not historic places to be frozen and venerated. They are live canvasses to be constantly engaged, the source of identity and prosperity for one of the most beautiful and proud states in our country.

Published in Council Report II: Case Studies of New Urban Infill Development,  2002