My family and I are new Albuquerque residents, and like many transplants, we were drawn to the area’s natural beauty, rich cultural history, and varied opportunities for outdoor recreation. Most importantly, we moved here inspired by Bosque School, La Luz’s neighbor to the north, where I now serve as Middle School Division Head and our daughter attends as a tenth grader. 

Bosque is a private school with a public purpose, uniquely positioned geographically and pedagogically, and when I reflect on what I have come to value most about our school community, three core ideas resonate. We are a school that prioritizes helping students discover and become the best version of themselves, empowering them to lead lives of intellectual curiosity, personal integrity, and compassionate contribution. We are a school where our staffulty (a term we use to emphasize the fact that every employee’s contribution to the school ultimately impacts student learning and success) are kind and caring human beings first, and experts in their fields second. We are a school founded on the importance of meaningful and relevant learning opportunities across all disciplines that are inquiry-based and grounded in place, including the bosque and Rio Grande in our backyard, as well as the larger Albuquerque and New Mexico communities. 

This last notion of place-based learning stands as one of the school’s four core values, articulated in the following statement: 

by Danelle Callan

The La Luz del Oeste Foundation plays a unique and vital role in our community. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Foundation is dedicated to preserving the architectural heritage, landscape vision, and cultural identity that have defined La Luz since its creation in 1968. Its mission is forward-looking as well as historical: the Foundation maintains an educational role, safeguards community archives, and focuses on ensuring that the architectural and environmental principles that shaped La Luz continue to guide us through the community’s 100-year horizon of 2068.

One valuable tool available to a nonprofit like the Foundation is the ability to pursue grant funding. Grants from federal agencies, state programs, and private foundations can be highly appealing because they offer meaningful support for projects such as historic documentation, educational programming, conservation planning, community improvements, and the preservation of distinctive architectural features. However, while grants can open doors to resources that enrich the community, they also require significant effort, careful planning, and a sustained long-term commitment to manage effectively.

by Pat Gallagher

In early summer, I was invited to give a short talk about La Luz at a symposium on Ambient Energy. This is a fresh new name for Passive Solar, which is mostly about using the sun to make a home or office more comfortable. In the extreme, it could be about a zero-energy architecture; but in reality, it means making the most of natural energy, night and day, winter and summer. 

The Symposium was sponsored by the University of Louisville-JB Speed School of Engineering. Numerous New Mexico architects and builders (passive solar pioneers) helped organize the Ghost Ranch gathering in September 2025. It was an overdue sequel to a similar meeting 50 years ago also held at Ghost Ranch, about the same time La Luz was completed.

My contribution to the symposium was to give a quick history of the people and ideas that created La Luz, with a bit about how well the design fits into living with the Sun. 

Collected by Pat Gallagher (2025)
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The five short videos below tell a successful (so far) story of how a homeowner’s association recovered from past practices to create a simpler, less expensive, and longer lasting solution to community care of their common property.

by Ginny Hautau

The New Town Movement emerged in early twentieth-century Britain as a bold reimagining of urban development. Ebenezer Howard's Garden City concept, was introduced in his 1898 book, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, and was first realized at Letchworth in 1903, where architects Barry Parker and Raymon Unwin proposed self-contained communities that balanced residential, commercial, and agricultural zones while preserving green spaces and limiting population density. These towns offered an antidote to industrial sprawl, prioritizing human scale and community cohesion over unchecked growth.

By the 1950s and 60s, this philosophy crossed the Atlantic, captivating a generation of American developers and builders who saw opportunity in postwar suburbanization. Some young visionaries recognized that thoughtful planning could create housing options beyond cookie-cutter subdivisions. They sought communities designed with intention, where infrastructure, housing, and amenities were developed in sync with one another. Towns like Reston, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; and Irvine, California embodied this ambition, incorporating mixed-use zoning, pedestrian pathways, and communal gathering spaces that fostered neighborly interaction. ​

by Christopher Mead

​We have owned our La Luz unit for over 30 years. After extensive travel in the U.S. and abroad, we discovered New Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley in the early 1990s. It was "Love at First Visit". The beauty of the scenery, vibrant color, the sky, the geography and the people were breathtaking for us.

We had some friends in Michigan that had a place in New Mexico so we learned about La Luz through that connection. For us, La Luz captured all the beautiful and unique parts of New Mexico. We knew we wanted to have a home in this community. La Luz was magical, beautiful, and spiritual. The architecture, open space, unit construction, and views are special and one of a kind. We saw a cluster home development that offered privacy and a quiet, natural setting. So, on July 27,1993, we purchased #2 Pool.

As we were still involved with our work careers and living out of state, we visited often and began learning about the local culture and the many historical and unusual points of interest at La Luz, around Albuquerque, and all over New Mexico. Our connection grew stronger, and our love for this place continued to increase.

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the La Luz del Oeste Foundation’s (LLF) newsletter, The View. The Foundation, an independent 501(c)3 organization founded in 2021 by a handful of La Luz residents, seeks to promote long-term sustainability of La Luz del Oeste and the surrounding open space through education, outreach, preservation, and innovation. 

La Luz del Oeste is a special place. Designed in the late '60s by world renowned architect Antoine Predock, La Luz captures the magic that results when ecological consciousness is combined with New Mexico’s historical adobe building traditions in combination with modern materials—poured concrete and large glass windows. Who could dispute the beauty and harmony of watching sandhill cranes soar over our open space or a full moon rise over the Sandias.
La Luz and the surrounding Bosque speaks to each of us in different ways; hence, our choice of “sense of place” as the overarching theme for our first issue. The term encompasses the diverse “emotional and psychological connections that individuals have with specific locations”2  in addition to honoring Predock’s creative design of La Luz that captures the alma de lugar, or “soul of a place.”3