HISTORY

For more than fifty years, HCSL’s property in Jacona has been a gathering place for artists, architects, writers and others who love this small northern New Mexico community nestled in the fertile valley of the Rio Grande and Pojoaque rivers.

The property is located on the southwest corner of what was the central plaza of the ancient Jacona Pueblo. Jacona was a small Tewa pueblo or village on the south side of the Pojoaque River. It was abandoned in 1696, after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 and the re-conquest of New Mexico by Diego De Vargas in 1693.

The five adobe buildings on the property were originally assembled in the 1950s by the renowned architect Nathaniel A. Owings – one of the founding partners of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) – and his second wife, Margaret, an artist and weaver. They envisioned creating a compound of buildings that would resemble an enclosed historic hacienda. Mr. and Mrs. Owings employed Native Americans from the nearby San Juan Pueblo who built from scratch some of the buildings on the property with hand-made adobe bricks. The Native Americans also renovated two other buildings including the caretaker’s house. The Owings gathered the buildings’ balustrades, doors and deep set windows from surrounding villages like Penasco. They also rescued old bridge timbers that spanned a stream near Las Trampas and used them as the wooden roof beams for the main house.

Nathaniel Owings christened the property “Festina Lente”. As he explains in his book entitled, The Spaces Between – An Architect’s Journey, “Whether under the burning sun of August or a soft blanket of snow with piñon smoke curling up from the low adobe houses, there is always mañana pervading our part of the great Southwest, lending a quality of festina lente to our New Mexican casa, which we therefore called “Festina Lente.” In that high mountain valley Margaret and I seriously follow the ritual of ‘making haste slowly’.”

To the founders and board members of HCSL, “Festina Lente” is an especially appealing moniker for their new home in Jacona. They understand the value of making haste slowly in bringing forward this new model of supported living and learning for developmentally disabled individuals and their families.