Sandia

26 January, 2013

Albuquerque, New Mexico

I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah

-Lowell George

Waking in the city of my birth, it was cool and cloudy.  The Sandia Mountains rose beyond the valley with snow on the upper reaches. We decided to take a day’s respite from the road, after 1300 miles in 4 days, and went into the adobe district of Old Town for a walking tour.

Starting at Fellow Traveler Antoine Predock’s Albuquerque Museum, we crossed around the South and East exposures, making photos and sniffing bushes. Kaya seemed particularly eager to go exploring and left little uninspected.

We checked out the Museum of Natural History, with its two domes, meandering about Tiguex Park, towards the Explora Children’s Museum. Explora has a playful quality to its layout, a multi-colored geodesic dome and kinetic machines, some driven by wind. As the building curves back to the Northeast, Old Town Street splits to the Southeast, and the architecture is all adobe, with its freeform tendencies, poles framing the roof extending beyond the walls.

I noticed that the adobe was actually simulated adobe, or cement stucco stained the color of mud.

The smells of pinon pine drifting through the courtyards and alleyways gave me a sense of déjà vu, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it went back to my childhood. I distinctly remember that soothing smell from camping trips into the Sierra Nevada Mountains as a youth.

Albuquerque is a city with a vibrant passion for the arts, and the overpasses and streetscape furniture reflects not only artistic decoration, but regional motifs like the art rock figures from the Anasazi Indians, iguanas, scorpions and snakes. Phoenix was similarly decorated, seemingly awakened to the arts by the presence of Taliesin.

My father told me that he used to ski at a slope operated by Ben Abruzzo who went on to cross the Atlantic in a balloon. The Anderson-Abruzzo Hot Air Balloon Museum is built adjacent to Balloon Festival Park, which when the festival is not happening, is several hundred acres of open space.  I had been considering that the scale of travel profoundly affects the architecture of our ports and portals, train stations, airports, seaports, like the Embarcadero, in San Francisco.

The scale of the Balloon Museum is apparent in its openness, being a unique, perhaps bizarre building, solitary in its setting, the scale is not decidedly human or urban, but that of the sky.

We walked around our fringe neighborhood at twilight, finding a vacant lot in which to play ball. Kaya got quite excited and bossy about the whole affair. It’s good to see her showing so much spirit.

She took a little demonstration on rooftop doggery during our sojourn through the adobe district: