A REGIONAL MODERNIST
ARCHITECT PHILIPPE REGISTER
Architect Philippe Register was the mastermind behind the College of Santa Fe campus in the late 1950s and designed nearly all of its buildings. He was born in Philadelphia and grew up there and in France, his mother’s country. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Yale University and a master’s in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.
Register went into business in Santa Fe with architect Kenneth Clark and opened his own office in 1960. His 1961-1978 projects for the College of Santa Fe included Benildus Hall, the administration building, the Greer Garson Theatre, and the Fogelson Library Center, as well as dormitories and classrooms. He was also the architect on Agua Fria Elementary School, the New Mexico State Police headquarters and training academy, Capshaw Junior High School, and several projects for the Aztec School System and for the Monastery of Christ in the Desert. From 1976 to 1990, Register was honorary French consul for New Mexico. He married Santa Fe artist Jody Le Cher in 1995. The architect died in 2006 in Santa Fe at age eighty-four. The Register buildings on the soon-to-be-derelict Santa Fe University of Art and Design campus are logical targets for preservation. “Phillipe Register at the time was really trying to come up with a regional modernism, so he designed all those buildings for the Brothers,” said Gayla Bechtol in December, when she was ending a year as president of the American Institute of Architects - Santa Fe. She mentioned that the colorful bas-relief friezes on the Garson Theatre had been covered at some point by brown stucco and windows had been replaced on dormitories that may qualify as historic.
A Register signature on several of the most important CSF buildings is a “truncated pyramid” effect that he achieved by using flat roofs and a sheathing of inward-tilting, precast panels. This sheathing with its fluted surface (which is known as “fractured rib” in the concrete business) appears on the Fogelson Library and the adjacent Forum and Southwest Annex, as well as on the dominant top section of the Garson Theatre. On the library and the annex, tall voids — reminiscent of the rounded, flat-topped shapes of Northern New Mexico’s ancient adobe buildings — were cut out of the panels to create a distinctive colonnade effect. — P.W.