Historic Cultural Properties Inventory Manual, Historic Preservation Division, New Mexico Office of Cultural Affairs

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From introduction: "It has been more than twenty years since the precursor to today’s Historic Preservation Division (HPD) published the state’s first Historic Building Inventory Manual. The discipline of historic preservation has changed dramatically during that time in New Mexico and throughout the world. Put simply, historic preservation is not just about mansions anymore. Increasingly, historic preservation is concerned with the preservation of heritage – the complex interweaving of tradition, culture, and built environment that gives meaning to people and place. That broadened approach to preservation is reflected in this manual. It is reflected first in the variety of properties the manual addresses. Where the previous manual focused primarily on the inventory of buildings, this revised version promotes the surveying of a greater diversity of the state’s cultural properties. As such, it has been renamed the Historic Cultural Properties Inventory (HCPI) manual. The new HCPI manual and survey forms strive to provide a greater opportunity to document historic buildings as well as structures, sites, objects, districts, and cultural landscapes in New Mexico. Historic cultural properties can be buildings in the most common sense, such as houses, businesses, or government offices. But they can also encompass a diverse range of structures, such as railroad trestles, Works Progress Administration masonry walls, park monuments, or Cold War equipment on military bases... The previous manual focused on the collection of information about architectural styles and exterior visual features as a primary basis for the inventory; this manual urges surveyors to place emphasis on other considerations as well, particularly historic and cultural contexts and the significance of the property to its community. New Mexico’s built heritage is primarily the result of local adaptation and the embedding of many cultural influences, some of them wildly diverse and incongruous... The significance of these mixed-and-matched styles and elements is that they reflect the layering of New Mexico’s built heritage. Previous surveys have tended to split stylistic differences into many categories, leaving some categories with only one example. (The “Spanish Colonial Baroque Revival” Lensic Theater in Santa Fe is of particular note.) The confusion is increased when one building reflects any number of influences, such as the yellow brick-encased adobe San Albino Church in La Mesilla, with its Dutch gable, square towers, and stained glass windows. As often as not, a property fails to fit neatly into a prescribed style; New Mexico’s vernacular architecture has borrowed liberally from many different periods and stylistic traditions. This is not to say that properties cannot be classified; they can be in large part. It is the intent of this manual to assist the surveyor in identifying the general style or era of a property and then to describe the embellishments that make its classification elusive and, concurrently, New Mexican." Funding was provided in part by a 2000 Historic Preservation Fund grant administered by the New Mexico State Historic Preservation Office (project number NM-00-015, grant number 35-00-15334) and the State, Tribal, and Local Plans and Grants Division, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior.

Historic Cultural Properties Inventory Manual, Historic Preservation Division, New Mexico Office of Cultural Affairs

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