Face of Business
Architect's urban vision bridges present with past
New Mexico Business Weekly - by Tom O'Connell NMBW Staff
The 15 new tri-livel live/work lofts on Santa Fe's Pacheco Street are an anomaly in the industrial area where they sit. The Pacheco Street Lofts are also an example, hopes the architect who designed them, of the kind of urban residential infill New Mexico will be seeing a lot more of in the future.
Chris Calott discusses his new urban ideas while sitting in downtown Albuquerque's Flying Star Cafe at Silver Avenue and 7th Street, a one-time Southern Union Gas Co. building that Calott redesigned, along with partner Tom Gifford of Calott + Gifford Architecture/Urban Design. Calott's other company, Infill Solutions, the business and development end of his operation, occupies the basement level of the building. A private elevator connects the two businesses. Across the street is the Silver Lofts, another example of Calott's infill vision.
Calott thinks of his infill projects as "missing teeth."
"We want to fill in the missing teeth," he says, "to add density and make neighborhoods more viable ... block by block, project by project, tapping into the energy of this city."
The tricky part of such development, says Calott, is to blend into the existing architecture and infrastructure of a place, and especially its culture. That would seem to be a challenge in the culturally rich, 300-year-old Albuquerque. The major philosophy of Calott's development and design companies, he says, is to "reintroduce New Mexican urban building typologies such as courtyards, rural compounds, plazas and dense streets.
"What attracts me to New Mexico is that New Mexico has the oldest urban traditions in the United States -- both Spanish and Native American. And we are inspired by this tradition, and wish to reinvent and extend these traditions. And that's urbanism."
The name Calott (emphasis on first syllable) is derived from the original Greek name Tscalotos, which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. At some point between the old country and America, the family name was shortened and Anglicized. Chris Calott was born in Portland, Ore., and grew up in Minneapolis. His father, a first-generation American, was born in New York City and grew up in the Astoria section of Queens, a borough of New York City. Calott still has family there.
While an undergraduate at Brown University in Providence, R.I., he studied for a year at Manhattan's Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, where the faculty, he says, included "world-class top thinkers in their field." After earning a bachelor's degree in urban theory and design from Brown in 1983, Calott went on to Princeton University, where he received his master's degree in architecture in 1987.
So why Albuquerque?
One word: Predock. Antoine Predock is a world-renowned Duke City architect whose work Calott had always admired and been inspired by.
Calott says he "begged him for a job from afar."
He came to Albuquerque to work for Predock soon after graduating from Princeton. In 1989, after working for the architect for two years, Calott opened Predock's Los Angeles office, in the bohemian-chic enclave of Venice Beach. He was the lead designer there for three years.
In 1992 he opened his own firm in Los Angeles, Christopher Calott Architecture and Urban Design. He also started teaching those disciplines. His residencies included Auburn University in Alabama, the University of Miami and the University of California-Berkeley. For five years he taught at the Universidad de Anahuac in Mexico City in a 10-week joint summer program between that school and the University of Arkansas.
Calott's education focus, he says, has always been on urbanism, design and housing. He defines urbanism as "the practice of building the city [while] thinking about everything from buildings to streets to public spaces like plazas, and proposing all the mixed uses to support them vibrantly....
"An urban architect is less interested in a single building and more interested in a block that creates more vibrancy."
Having developed a body of work and a set philosophy, Calott returned to Albuqueque, a city he saw as "ripe" for development and also the perfect place to raise a family. He moved here with his wife in 1998 and became a "professor in practice," teaching architecture, urban design and urban theory at the University of New Mexico. Calott taught while practicing privately for seven years.
One of his students was Tom Gifford, who, says Calott, had done some of the earliest infill housing projects in Albuquerque, including the Martin Luther King townhouses near UNM. He had been in practice for 11 years when he decided to go back to school.
The two got together in 2000 for their first project, the redevelopment and design of downtown Gallup's courthouse square. Their next project was Plaza Contenta, a seven-acre mixed-use town center with affordable housing in the Tierra Contenta section of southwest Santa Fe.
The pair formed Infill Solutions with local real estate veteran Jay Rembe in 2001. The company has landed dozens of design and development awards, including the recent top Design Excellence Award from the American Institute of Architects for the Pacheco Street Lofts.
Calott says the lofts are his most ambitious project to date, and are poised to become the perfect example of "transit-oriented development" once the Rail Runner is extended to Santa Fe.
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