145. The construction and conversion of Old or New Santa Fe style buildings reached epidemic proportions during the 1930s. John Gaw Meem was the most prominent among the architects working in the "historical" idiom, his work including stylistic renovations as well as new construction. The architectural gloss he applied to the Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe in 1939 was so extreme that even a regular churchgoer might have mistaken what had been a Neo-Gothic building for a colonial Catholic church. See Bunting, John Gaw Meem . For Cristo Rey, see Krahe, Cristo Rey .

146. For the story of artists in New Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s, see Robertson and Nestor, Artists of the Canyons and Caminos ; and Eldredge, Schimmel, and Truettner, Art in New Mexico .

147. Carlos Vierra's paintings of the missions appear in Walters, "Mission Churches"; and in Hewett, Mission Monuments . In "New Mexico Architecture," Vierra argued for a regional architecture and condemned the Anglo remodeling of Cochiti as "benevolent vandalism." "Exterior arches have no place in this architecture—peak roofs are no part of it, and steeples—impossible. Peak roofs, steeples, the Roman arch of the Spanish colonial, and the Moorish arch were ruled out through the limitations of adobe as material in which these forms could not endure" (p. 46).

148. Because of the nature of adobe, there have been significant changes to the churches recorded by the HABS during the nearly half-century that has elapsed since the work was undertaken. A comparison of the plan of Isleta in this book and the HABS drawing (a plan based on it is published in Kubler, The Religious Architecture ) will show that one of the major buttresses has been removed. Many other changes in the structures are less drastic; but the buildings continue to evolve. Drawings of Acoma Pueblo—but, unfortunately, not of San Esteban—have been published in Nabokov, Architecture of Acoma Pueblo .

149. The Santa Fe Planning Department's Design and Preservation in Santa Fe tried to remedy some of the flaws in the Historical Style Ordinance, principally to develop guidelines for a coherent townscape rather than for aesthetically correct (if artificial) individual buildings.

150. Ruskin chided the reader (and the scraper): "Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it is impossible , as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture that which I have above insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and the eye of the workman, never can be recalled. Another spirit may be given by another time, and it is then a new building; but the spirit of the dead workman can not be summoned up, and commanded to direct other hands, and other thoughts." Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture , p. 184.

151. Owings, "Las Trampas," pp. 30-35.

152. Bunting, "San Agustín de la Isleta," pp. 14-16.

153. Kessell, The Missions of New Mexico , pp. 219-220.

154. One should not be too optimistic, however, as buildings of mud exist in a state of constant crisis. Picuris collapsed in the late 1980s; and several smaller churches have been allowed to deteriorate or have been bulldozed when there was no other alternative. Given the problems of continual care that adobe structures require, the existence of the smaller structures will always be tenuous.