Light on Its Feet
At the Base of the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque, a Singular Link Between Earth and Sky
To American architects, Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Bart Prince stands out as one of the most inventive minds in the field, able to spin common materials straight from the lumberyard into delirious fantasies. Descending professionally from Oklahoma’s architectural fabulist and contrarian Bruce Goff and, more distantly, from Frank Lloyd Wright, he has a lineage that is distinguished and a reputation substantiated with a portfolio of imaginative and generous buildings that are at once powerful, detailed and fragile. He belongs to a great but little-sung western tradition of expansive, exuberant, unfettered architecture that leaves eastern critics scratching their heads, at a loss for just how to put their minds around the complex vision. Only with difficulty do the tamer shores of the East Coast accept the touch of wildness.
Despite his international fame, not many Albuquerque citizens really recognize Prince’s name—or at least not until you mention his house on Monte Vista, which they know better as the Spaceship. Then there’s instant image recognition: The house is a local monument and major curiosity, a place where cars regularly brake to a halt.
The Spaceship is in the same city where Suzanne Kolberg and Dan Scherger—he is an anesthesiologist, and she organizes exotic tours—owned a virgin one-acre site at the foot of the rugged Sandia Mountains. So Prince was conspicuous by his notoriety. But the couple were a little uncertain about taking on the architectural adventure, and when they hired him, after interviewing other architects, they made themselves clear. They wanted something that was timeless and contemporary and that fit the lot and the views. “But we also said we wanted a house that was basically livable and not too strange,” she says. “Not too out there. We said we needed a basic two-bedroom, with a lot of room for our cars. We asked him for Bart Prince Lite.”
Given his reputation and the strength of his architectural signature, Prince’s philosophy is surprisingly elastic: “I always begin with the client and the site, and each time I like to start again. I don’t come with preconceptions. As I learn from the site and the client and the requirements, I begin to look at what can be done—in an interesting way.”
In the Wrightian tradition, Prince dreams on the landscape. “He loved the lot,” says Kolberg. “He’d come to the site and climb a ladder and spend hours just thinking about it,” she says. Like Tonto jumping off his pinto to put his ear against the ground to listen for hoofbeats, Prince hears what the land and landscape say about what the house wants to be.
But the messages he heard and saw from the ladder were not only about the land, the long view of the Rio Grande Valley and the night lights of Albuquerque below. It was also about the light and the sky. “I wanted to sense how the fall of the light would affect certain rooms and how the house would play to the sunrise and sunset.”
The challenge was to conceive a house that would tread very gently on the site but would have a character that matched the forceful nature around it. Rather than dropping what Prince calls “a blob” in the middle on a leveled site, he organized the house around a circular courtyard open on one side to the mountains (which, as a national park, will always stay pristine). The semicircle, which climbed up with the slope, took advantage of the topography.
“Bart invited us into the design process, and he and Dan started talking about the possibilities of a half circle, with the open side facing the mountains,” says Kolberg.
“I wanted to leave the site undisturbed, so it read and flowed through the house, along with the snakes, coyotes and deer,” says Prince, who was aided by project architect J. Kory Baker. Like a spider, the building lifts itself lightly above the terrain, touching at points. Masonry bearing walls radiate from an invisible center in the courtyard, their ends reaching in all directions.
Counterintuitively, the front door is at the rear of the house, in the circular court. A visitor walks from the road, under the house, toward the mountains and the encircled yard. There, a ramp angles back toward the middle of the house’s semicircle and to the front door, which opens to the sunset and the Rio Grande Valley. Prince has inverted the normal entrance sequence so that the inner court becomes the front yard. “You have the experience of nature before you get to the front door,” notes Kolberg. A corridor running along the interior face of the courtyard steps up as it leads to all the rooms.
There are views at every turn, many unexpected, through windows low and high, small and large. Photons bombard the interior, leaving no dark patches. “I was working with the idea of light and lightness, and I detached the roofs from the bearing walls with slots of space that let light wash all the block walls,” says Prince. The roofs appear to float against halos of light. He extends the line of the bearing walls toward the court with steel beams that form triangles that converge over the center, recalling the spokes of a tepee. “The beams define the outdoor space and bring the sky into the composition,” says Prince. “Their profile ties the building both to the ground and to the sky.”
With all the windows, the house is highly porous and layered: “From any room you can see past parts of it through to other parts and even to the outside,” says Kolberg. “When I’m sitting in the TV room, I can see through several different rooms. But because it’s a half circle, I can’t see the neighbors.”
Sometimes nature, even nature with a majestic stature, can be improved upon. Prince’s house with the radiating lines adds to the magnificence. The design explains and reveals the site, delivering nature via a building that emphasizes experience rather than image.
“While hiking in Chaco Canyon, I saw an Anasazi ruin called Pueblo Bonito,” recalls Kolberg. “There are a lot of half-circular ceremonial dwellings, and we thought there was a spiritual connection between our house and the pueblo. We’ve hung a lithograph of the canyon in a prominent place, so we’re always thinking of the connection. Now we call our place Chaco. ”