Ricardo Legorreta is remembered as the protégé of Luis Barragán. The late Mexican architect designed Pershing Square in Downtown Los Angeles and the San Antonio Public Library, and also smaller residential projects throughout California such as Casa de Plata.
In 1999, Legorreta completed the Visual Arts Center at the College of Santa Fe, which later became the Santa Fe University of Art + Design in 2010. Eight years later, in 2018, the university closed, casting a shadow of uncertainty over the ensemble that Legorreta conceived as a pueblo.
Today, the Santa Fe office of MASS Design Group is working with a group called Midtown Arts and Design Alliance (MADA) to breathe new life back into the Legorreta project. The goal is to transform 50,000 square feet of buildings, spread across four acres, into a new nonprofit arts and culture district.
Jamie Blosser, MADA CEO, is a practicing architect. After her Loeb Fellowship concluded in 2015 at Harvard, Blosser took over the Santa Fe Art Institute where the original vision for the MADA began.
“The fact that these buildings have been vacant for the past eight years—every day with a vacant building there’s potential for deterioration,” Blosser told AN. “A key generator of this project is serving the community but it’s also about making sure these architecturally significant buildings are restored and brought back to have a vibrant life in the community.”
MASS Design Group, for the past three years, has met with over 3,000 Santa Fe residents—namely youth, low-income residents, and Spanish speakers—to arrive at the design, which honors Legorreta by repurposing the existing buildings for sustained cultural and social innovation.
Renderings show the Legorreta-designed buildings maintaining their distinct red and pink hues. Large windows will wash the ground floor spaces with natural light, and provide strong visual connections with the courtyards.
“Legorreta loved color and playing with notions of natural and artificial light and that is something we are leveraging in thinking about the design of the MADA,” said Joseph Kunkel, principal at the MASS Santa Fe studio, and director of MASS’s Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab.
The future district will host at least 12 nonprofits and four divisions of the University of New Mexico, MADA said.
Some of the nonprofits anticipated to call the district home are Little Globe, a documentary filmmaking and storytelling collective; an arts organization Vital Spaces; and Santa Fe Indigenous Center. MASS is also planning on moving its Santa Fe office to MADA upon completion.
A theater, library, cultural entrepreneur workshops, art and dance studios, teen arts programming, exhibition and maker spaces, artist residences, a community center, an outdoor film screening area, and more will abound to support the varying groups that will move into the district.
The courtyards in between the buildings will have a large open space for gatherings, art installations, plantings, trees, and seating. Expressive murals will be painted on some of the walls.
In future phases MADA will build housing on the 4-acre site. A World War II-era military hospital located inside barracks will have facade asbestos remediation, before they become maker spaces for MAKE Santa Fe and Youth Works.
“Santa Fe is an arts hub—it’s a place that’s known for its creativity and it’s one of the largest art markets in the country and yet for the people that live here it doesn’t feel accessible,” Kunkel said.
“The goal with this project is to think through how to create more accessible arts space for non profit organizations that are equitable and welcoming to everybody in the city so that people that want to practice and contribute not just from a fine arts space can do that,” Kunkel elaborated.
The project is expected to break ground later this year and start welcoming tenants in 2027.