Capitol in the Round

The citizens of Santa Fe, N. Mex., have a 356-year-old architectural heritage of which they are mighty proud.

And in 1957 they passed a strict ordinance designed to preserve their traditional pueblo Indian and Spanish colonial styles. Even gas stations and supermarkets are now required to have narrow windows, flat roofs, and adobe-tan-colored walls.

When New Mexico-born Architect Willard Carl Kruger was first selected to design a new state capitol, he proposed that it should be "monumental pueblo."

But the Old Santa Fe Association, the conservation group that had sponsored the city's historical ordinance, saw nothing resembling a pueblo in the first plans.

True, walls slanted like adobe slabs, windows were kept to narrow slits and the roof was flat. But Architect Kruger had proposed making a trim, circular building that resembled a massive beveled cogwheel. To historical buffs, it looked altogether too modern.

By the time hostile criticism reached a climax, the cost of starting afresh seemed prohibitive to a state whose population only this year passed the 1,000,000 mark. The building commit tee decided to keep the circular concept, but to change the facade. As New Mexicans dedicated the $5.2 million structure last week, they found that the U.S.'s newest state capitol had a little bit of everything except a dome.

The new facade is a Greco-pueblo-neo-Monticello compromise, and like most compromises, likely to please no one. The drumlike walls are sheathed in adobe-colored concrete trimmed with a red brick cornice; narrow porticos add a Federal touch; bronze doors, capped with Greek pediments, are set in four entrances that project to form, in an air view, the Zia Indian tribe's radiating symbol of the sun.

In the interior, Architect Kruger was able to keep to his original elegant scheme. Fan-shaped legislative halls open onto a 60-ft.-high rotunda. Doors to dangerous service areas have abrasive-covered handles to warn the blind, and the Governor has a telephoto peephole to survey his anteroom. As for visitors who may want to know what an authentic Southwestern government house would look like, Santa Feans can still proudly point to the nearby 1610 Palace of the Governors, the oldest capitol in the U.S., a one-story Spanish colonial adobe structure that is the cornerstone of New Mexican style.

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