What it means
Pueblo Revival is the style that looks hand-molded out of the ground: flat roofs hidden behind rounded parapets, thick-looking stucco walls in earth tones, corners softened as if by weather, small deep-set windows, and round wooden beams, vigas, poking out of the wall below the roofline. Locals and decorators call it the Santa Fe look, because that is where it became a civic religion.
In Scottsdale the word gets used three ways. For houses, it describes the 1960s and 70s homes and townhouses with parapets and fake vigas that the city’s preservation office files under “Popular Pueblo.” For commercial buildings, it recalls the shopping centers of the same era, like Papago Plaza at Scottsdale and McDowell roads, a 1960s strip of adobe-look stucco and rounded parapets razed in 2019. And for civic Scottsdale, it describes something more original: Bennie Gonzales’s white Civic Center, which took the pueblo’s massing and turned it into modern architecture.
Where you’ll meet it
On the Civic Center Mall, in South Scottsdale and older central neighborhoods, on home listings promising “Santa Fe style,” and in the architecture guide.
Where the word came from
The style was invented in New Mexico in the first years of the 20th century. The University of New Mexico led: its president, William G. Tight, championed the style, and the 1908 remodeling of Hodgin Hall gave it an early campus landmark. In Santa Fe, architect Isaac Rapp’s New Mexico Museum of Art (1917) and La Fonda hotel (1922) set the template, with projecting vigas, carved corbels, latillas across the beams and stepped, stuccoed masses.
Santa Fe then made the look mandatory. A committee led by architect John Gaw Meem drafted the city’s Historical Zoning Ordinance, adopted in 1957, which requires new buildings in the historic district to follow the “Old Santa Fe Style,” meaning Pueblo or Territorial. That is why Santa Fe looks the way it does and why “Santa Fe” became the brand name for the style everywhere else.
Scottsdale had no such law and no pueblo history; the pueblos are hundreds of miles to the northeast, and the peoples of this valley built differently. The style arrived here as a postwar fashion. The city’s preservation survey of townhouses built from 1960 to 1974 lists “Popular Pueblo” among its revival styles: flat roofs with parapets, vigas and canales, rounded walls and roof corners, stucco, heavy timber lintels.
What it is not
Pueblo Revival is not Spanish Colonial Revival, which brings red tile roofs, arches and bell towers; it is not Territorial, which squares the corners and caps the parapet with brick; and it is not adobe, since most Pueblo Revival buildings are block or frame under stucco.
The fine print
The Gonzales version. The city hired Bennie Gonzales in 1965 to plan its government quarter. His City Hall and Civic Center Library opened in 1968: thick, battered white walls, deep shadowed openings and the sunken council chamber everyone calls the Kiva. He wanted real adobe; building rules pushed him to masonry and concrete. His own approach was less a revival than a translation. Accounts of his career stress how he minimized right angles and folded in Southwestern cultural references, a manner he also brought to the Hopi Cultural Center on Second Mesa in 1976. Calling it Pueblo Revival is close but not quite right; “pueblo-modern” is nearer.
The resort version. Camelback Inn, opened in 1936, built its casitas of adobe, the real earthen tradition that later Pueblo touches on Valley resorts imitate in stucco.
The caveat. The Valley’s own building traditions, Hohokam and O’odham, were not pueblos, and Scottsdale’s official image was the false-front West’s Most Western Town. The Santa Fe look here is a borrowing, sometimes inspired, sometimes stuck on with glue.