Santa Fe Living Treasures – Elder Stories

Young William made his first trip to Santa Fe in 1927 with friend Peter Hurd; later, as a graduate of the University of New Mexico School of Architecture, he designed over two thousand buildings in Santa Fe, including DeVargas Center and Rancho Encantado. Merging modern technology with ancient adobe building techniques, William was responsible for many historic preservation projects in town. Notably the restoration of the Santuario de Guadalupe.

With other solar activists, in 1972 William founded Sun Mountain Design, an influential group responsible for the solar demonstration center at Ghost Ranch, north of Santa Fe. He was an innovator with the photo voltaic cell, which converts solar energy to electricity, and an advocate of other renewable energy sources, such as the hot dry rock application

A noted watercolorist, William has been associated with the major art movements of New Mexico in this century. As one of the Transcendentalists, he painted with Raymond Jonson. He frequented both the New Canton Cafe on San Francisco Street and the Plaza Cafe with the Santa Fe artist group Los Cinco Pintores. His work has been exhibited world-wide, in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., with the Paris World's Fair American Group of 1940 in Chicago; Ketchum, Idaho, and La Jolla, California. A 1996 exhibit introduced adventurous abstract acrylics on paper. "Architecture is discipline --painting is freedom. I need both," he explains his accomplishments.

Please see Volume 1 for complete text.
Photo ©1997 by Joanne Rijmes