Building Northern New Mexico & Santa Fe

A Tour with and about Women Architects and Builders

Lecture by Sarah Rovang

Followed by a tour with Gayla Bechtol, Dierdre Harris (DNCA Architects), and Becca Snyder

Saturday, October 10, 1-5pm

Join the Historic Santa Fe Foundation (HSFF) on 10 October at 1pm for an opening architecture lecture by Sarah Rovang, author of Through the Long Desert: Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright, followed by a downtown tour. The guides for the tour include some of Santa Fe’s most recognized female architects who contributed to the planning, design, construction, renovation, or restoration of significant structures in the Railyard area. The lecture and tour include a welcome reception and presentation hosted at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, where, before and after the tour, attendees are invited to explore the regionalism of renowned Southwest architect Judith Chafee in Powerhouse. Attendees will learn about the cultural history that has defined architecture in the Southwest, particularly in Santa Fe, NM, and experience the city’s unique architecture on a tour led by the experts who steward the city’s urban fabric. Post- tour social hosted at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art until 5pm. 

About the talk

“It is hard to do a hybrid”: Maria Chabot, Judith Chafee, and the Challenge of Regional Modernisms Decades before Judith Chafee established her successful practice in Tucson, Arizona, other women architects and builders wrestled with the uneasy marriage of modernism and Southwestern regional forms. In the reconstruction of Georgia O’Keeffe’s house at Abiquiú during the late 1940s, Maria Chabot (1913–2001) navigated the realities of building with adobe, postwar material shortages, and the need to establish trust within the local community. Steeped in the history of New Mexico and connected to figures like Kate Chapman and Dorothy Stewart, who fought to keep tradition alive in Santa Fe, Chabot brought her knowledge of craft and local form to the challenge of creating a year-round residence for one of the country’s foremost modern painters. Where Chabot chose to draw on the language of modernism, she did so in a site-specific and responsive way. Attuned to national debates around architectural style, Chabot was suspicious of the European-inflected modernism that influenced Chafee’s education and early practice. While Chafee came to her engaged regionalism through the canon of the International Style, Chabot drew modernism into a practice grounded in craft and local tradition. Chabot’s approach to negotiating regional forms and modernist design strategies is an under-recognized precedent for later theories of critical regionalism and the study of vernacular architecture.

About the tourguide

Sarah Rovang is an architectural historian and writer living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She holds a Ph.D. from Brown University in the History of Art and Architecture, with a focus on rural and industrial environments of the twentieth- century United States. Her first book, Through the Long Desert: Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright, was published with Rizzoli Electa in 2025. She currently works as a program evaluator for the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee.