Rancho Viejo

MASTER PLANNING AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE BY DESIGN WORKSHOP

Travel 16 miles south of Santa Fe, and you’ll encounter a place where past meets present: a mixed-use community made up of traditional New Mexico-style villages with a forward-thinking approach to preserving the area’s most precious natural resource: water.

“The first thing we did was hold a two-day workshop to identify what the community should be,” says Joe Porter, founding partner of urban planning and landscape architecture firm Design Workshop, who worked with SunCor Development Company and the County of Santa Fe to envision Rancho Viejo. “We established that the development had to fit the land; it couldn’t be destructive of it,” he says.

That workshop not only yielded an innovative plan for 20,000 acres of raw land—which would give birth to a high-density, 10-village community and preserve half the land as open space—but also created a water-conservation plan that would honor Santa Fe’s strict water-use requirements. (The county’s residents can consume roughly half the water that Denver dwellers use, and about a third of that used by Las Vegas and Phoenix residents.)

But perhaps most importantly, the workshop began what would become a vibrant collaboration between the design team and local officials.

“I believe there are certain elements of the community-development process that are broken,” says Porter, who’s worked in community development for 40 years. In order to change the result of development, he believes we must go back and change the process. This project did just that, says Porter. “Its legacy is of people who are normally adversarial working together,” he says.

THE BIG PICTURE

The visionaries behind Rancho Viejo set out to build a community with three main goals in mind:

PRESERVE LAND  Porter brought to this project plenty of experience with breaking up large tracts of land into a handful of units, and siting homes far away from each other. But that just didn’t seem right for this property. “It was much better for [a large portion of the land] to go to public use,” he says. The 10,000 acres of preserved open space were carefully chosen to protect the natural arroyos—gulches in the high-mountain-desert landscape that serve as a natural drainage system to replenish underground aquifers. The network of trails follows the contours of the arroyos, allowing residents to enjoy the beautiful landscape without causing it harm.
BUILD COMMUNITY  A series of walkable villages was designed to foster a sense of community. Each cluster of homes has a central plaza for gathering and socializing, and offers a mix of residential
options: townhomes, lofts, two-story live/work units and a variety of single-family homes. The lay of the land determines the footprint of the development—and not the other way around, as is often the case. “The land patterns form the villages,” says Porter. These housing groups sit upon the flat, elevated meadows, while more dispersed estate homes are tucked into the wooded hillsides, and the stretching arroyos and grasslands are left untouched.
SAVE WATER  The community makes use of two water lines—a conventional line and a reuse line—that work together to meet its needs. Recycled water irrigates turf in the plazas and native plants along the streetscapes; the open space follows its own natural water cycle. The project’s smart water-saving efforts have created a stir in the county, encouraging other developers to think similarly about protecting the vital natural resource. “The project has the potential to influence future development for the better,” Porter says.

MASTER PLANNER & LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT Design Workshop, Aspen, CO, 970-925-8354, designworkshop.com DEVELOPER Mike Richards, SunCor Development Corporation RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE Studio E Architects, San Diego, CA, 619-235-9262, studioearchitects.com; Linderoth Associates, Scottsdale, AZ, 480-941-0840, linderoth.com COMMERICAL ARCHITECTURE Nelson Architects SIGNANGE CONSULTANT CW&H Graphics, Franktown, CO, 303-571-5517, cwhgraphics.com