Decoding Place via 'Hamlet and Shrine'
Visualizing Movement and Settlement in New Mexico
“Before the city, there was the hamlet and the shrine,” said Lewis Mumford.
Last week, I visited the immediate predecessor to Santa Fe. The Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh is not too far north of where I live.
It was—from 1598 until 1610—the first Spanish capital of New Mexico, and later, was at the heart of the Pueblo Revolt as the home of its leader, Po’pay. It carried the name of San Juan Pueblo until 2005, and, based on the merged traditions of the region, it features two Catholic church structures—both the evolved San Juan Bautista Church and a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes, built in 1890.
The initial chapters of Lewis Mumford’s epic 1961 inquiry into urban origins and prospects, The City in History, contained highly quotable and inspirational characterizations of human settlements (noted here).
Mumford built urban origins around a basic human social disposition to gather. He then evoked an evolution from caves to crossroads, premised on the two poles of human life: “movement and settlement”.
These crossroads show physical forms that reflect protection and worship, two elements central to the evolution of human settlement, regardless of duration.
While Mumford offered some black and white photographs to illustrate his original work, I’ve long believed that current photography can further “supplement” such classic treatises on urbanism, as a tribute to their ongoing life.
For me, this is also a matter of a lens built on heredity. My father, Myer R. Wolfe, argued in a 1965 academic journal* that:
Many social studies of communities refer implicitly or explicitly to urban form without so much as a picture, map or diagram. Yet visual material can make a contribution to understanding the urban environment itself, the interrelationship of society and environment, and the development of techniques for study and communication.
I have written all this before, first in a 2010 post, which, in a tout to Mumford, illustrated settlement patterns in France derived from their spiritual focal points.
However, it took a visit to Santa Fe’s immediate predecessor—emphasizing the merger of Catholic churches with Pueblo culture—to cause me to remember and connect these threads: Mumford’s words, the personal lens, and an underlying theme of place in New Mexico.
*See Wolfe, Myer R. (1965) ‘A Visual Supplement to Urban Social Studies ‘, Journal of the American Planning Association 31: 1; 51-62.