What does New Mexico Architectural Style mean? The early settlers in New Mexico came from Mexico and Spain in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Don Juan de Onate colonized the area above Espanola in 1598, one hundred eight years after Columbus came to the Americas. The early settlers of New Mexico were completely familiar with adobe construction methods, which had been developed six to eight thousand years by Moors, who came to Spain in the fifth century and brought the system with them from Egypt and the Middle East. .
According to nineteenth-century descriptions Hispanic New Mexican houses are very similar in character to the Mediterranean house. All the rooms opened into the court, and there was a porch or portal running around all four- court walls. .
The "Spanish-pueblo" (1920s and 1930s) is the earliest form and prevalent in Spain at the time of settlement of New Mexico. This is a style where the walls are in adobe from two feet thick to thirty or thirty six inches thick. The relationship between the wall and his thick depend of the height of the wall. The floor of the early houses were in adobe mud smoothes by hand and often were painted with bloom from animals producing a dark, black brown color. .
For the roof structure, pine lays across the walls. A layer of straws was laid over this and then about eighteen to twenty-four inches of adobe mud applied. The surface was almost flat, .
The territorial style is a combination of several elements. Walls were of adobe with burned brick firewall. Those walls were plastered with lime-sand stucco, which is much better than the cement stucco used today. Windows in the territorial style was set outside face of the wall. The beams were often square with sawn or split boards laid over The burned clay tile roof, typical of modern Spain and Mexico was not found in New Mexico before about 1880.
The New Mexico Architectural Style is rich in details, when artist form other parts of the country invaded the Taos area in the late 1800s and Santa Fe in the 1920s a rich creative force as added to the local craft of building.