I enjoyed a wonderful home excursion to Santa Fe. While I was visiting one of those older homes, a fellow traveler said that this particular home had a wonderful zaguan. I stopped, turned and asked her what she was speaking to. She pointed back into the covered courtyard entry, telling me that the zaguan is your entry portal into the courtyard. The traditional zaguan needed to be large enough to allow a horse-drawn wagon to put in the courtyard and also to allow all of the livestock to be brought in for security. It had been a way of securing the house and all of the family’s possessions .
Obviously, I was very pleased that I’d gotten to learn a new phrase. Though I’d seen zaguans in films and elsewhere, I’d no clue what this distinct architectural element was termed.
While the zaguan is a really traditional architectural element that’s common across the American Southwest and Mexico, it has a number modern interpretations too. Let’s take a peek.
Bud Dietrich
Here is the zaguan at the John Gaw Meem house in Santa Fe, where I got an on-the-spot lesson. Distinguishing characteristics include a wide entryway, initially to allow wagons to pass through, and big, solid doors to keep out danger. Even the zaguan is also a covered space, which contributes to the safety of the house.
And while a zaguan has its origins in the functional necessity of securing inside from outside, it does so in a way that could only be described as poetic. Leaving the bright sunshine, arid landscape and dangerous untamed universe of the outside, one goes through a dark and compressed space …
David Howell Design
… to enter into a world where nature is tamed and domestic life can flourish.
Bud Dietrich
Even though a zaguan was used to safeguard inside from outside, something that’s not as important as it was, it remains an important feature of traditional Santa Fe and Southwest design.
A wide opening with wooden gates that allow people to pass beneath a low roof becomes important to the structure as the stuccoed walls. Even if the walls are curved and the gates only a little trickier to make, the zaguan was created and built with style and attention because, after all, this is the front door to the house, as shown here together with the Frank Lloyd Wright–made Pottery House.
Carson Poetzl, Inc..
As we move closer to present day, we could realize that the zaguan has lived less as front door and more as portal. New, traditionally designed homes in the adobe and Southwest vernacular style incorporate more of a vestigial zaguan as an entry mark and a gateway into the courtyard. Let’s face it, it might be a stretch to see donkeys pulling carts using these gates.
DeForest Architects
And while I do appreciate the historical reference and application of a zaguan to separate inside from outside, I truly find it lovely when the feature is employed in a more modern architectural design.
Of course there are differences between the historical and modern zaguans. Solid, massive and heavy wooden doors have been replaced by thinner, lighter and more transparent gates. And the compressed and dark space was replaced with a taller, wider and much more generous transition.
Still, the zaguan shows us how contemporary structure could be suspended in historical forms, and the way these kinds can have new life breathed into them.
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