Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Design (MDes) in Interior Studies / Adaptive Reuse
Department
Interior Architecture
First Advisor
Can Altay
Second Advisor
Nick Haus Heywood
Third Advisor
Christine Rankin
Abstract
History isn't the past; it is a continuing unfolding of the moment, yet we cannot feel time. We see traces of age through patina on copper, the wrinkles on a face from decades of laughter, or the holes in your favorite shirt. Similarly within architecture, what remains: ruins and fragments serve as layers that indicate the passage of time. In what ways are these layers exposed? Hidden? Erased? How do we determine what layers are worthy to be erased, maintained, or glorified as use of a structure or place continues to evolve through time?
The history of Albuquerque spans the Ancestral Pueblo Eras, the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the rise and fall of Route 66, and contemporary air and car travel. Sporadic yet rapid needs for each of these eras gave rise to architecture with unique characteristics.
The Alvarado Transportation Center, formerly the Alvarado Hotel, reflects these changing needs spanning over a century. This site has been adapted, re-adapted, largely demolished, and re imagined in response to dynamic modes of tourism and infrastructure. The Alvarado Hotel, which started as a lunch room, later evolved into a hotel with over 100 rooms, a dining hall, cocktail lounges, and the well known ‘Indian Building.’ The iconic hotel was filled with artwork and crafts made by the indigenous communities surrounding Albuquerque, and in this way the hotel helped create the image of the Southwest known throughout the United States and the world, constructed and reconstructed through an interplay of exoticism via tourism and cultural appropriation.
In 1970 immediately after being added to the New Mexico Historical Registry, the Alvarado was demolished and its contents sold at auction. These leftovers are the only preservation of the Alvarado, and serve as the indicators of a lost time, and objects from that era will be displayed as an archive of the past alongside their contemporary siblings via contemporary and distinctly identifiable recreations. This allows visitors to exist alongside history, dining with the pie stool of the past. This re-imagination is steeped in the existing building, atmosphere, and age of the Alvarado Hotel to suggest the story of a long ago place and our connection to that place which was erased. The century of history held within the objects from the hotel, the juxtaposition with their successors’ fading memories, and the distant recreation of its architecture will tell the story of the Southwest both past and present: how millions of acres and thousands of years of human history throughout New Mexico was imagined, constructed, and broadcast through the story of this particular building.
Recommended Citation
Duncan, Kayla R., "Strata: Portraits of the Alvarado & the Southwest" (2026). Masters Theses. 1550.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1550
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
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