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"View Slideshow\n\nA thousand years ago, on an isolated butte in Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico, the Anasazi Indians marked the arrival of solstices and equinoxes through eloquent assemblages of light. They aligned slabs of rock to channel the sun; thin beams passed through stony portals to alight at the center of a spiral petroglyph.\n\nThe Anasazi's sophisticated knowledge of astronomy and geometry is perhaps an unlikely departure point for a 10,000-square-foot minimalist residence of glass, steel and stone situated on 195 acres in the foothills north of Santa Fe. But, like its ancient counterparts, the house was placed using the guidance of the North Star and the sun at solar noon. In a fitting spin for art-conscious modern-day Santa Fe, a ray of sunlight, pencil thin at first, slowly makes its way across the silver-gray limestone floors of a long art gallery space, reaching the exact center of the hall at solar noon. The owners are awed by the light show. The wife, a novelist, calls the ray \"the power beam.\"\n\nDesigned by Stephen Bucchieri, a Cleveland architect, the residence is tucked below a ridgeline on a high crescent of land set amid a seemingly infinite tableau of brown earth, pi\u00F1on and juniper. To the east are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains; to the west are the Jemez Mountains. The burnished, weathered steel and stacked Pecos sandstone structure feels at once a part of the rugged terrain and its elegant foil. \"We wanted to merge with the landscape but also claim a part of it,\" the architect says.\n\nThe clients (the husband is an entrepreneur) are serious collectors of Minimalist art and sculpture, Incan textiles and Native American parfleches, buffalo and cowhide saddlebags that the husband likens to abstract painting. Strategically placing Minimalist pieces throughout\u2014including a meadow where sculpture now grazes\u2014they have curated their own landscape.\n\nThe couple wanted a residence that was itself a Minimalist artwork but was also respectful of the land. They strove to avoid architectural clich\u00E9s, or what Bucchieri calls \"adobe everywhere.\" The architect and the pair, for whom he had designed a previous residence near Cleveland, visited Chaco Canyon and became interested in the origins of indigenous architecture. They also admired the spalls of unquarried sandstone tumbling down vertiginous hillsides.\n\nThe long art space, located in the center of the residence and aligned with Polaris, forms a path connecting the main living spaces. Light enters through a central skylight, channeled through baffles that allow a 16-inch ray to move from east to west, arriving at the center around noon. Skylights along the sides create diffuse light that reflects off a horizontal shelf below, providing ideal conditions for viewing art.\n\nThe configuration of the gallery space, with its wide hall, extends outside, bringing the residence's structural elements into the landscape. The north end of the house culminates in a projecting steel deck that offers panoramic views. Its imposing overhang of deliberately weathered steel resembles welded industrial I-beams. \"We wanted the walls to continue past the structure so they would become part of the landscape,\" says the architect.\n\nTubular steel columns are designed to echo the peeled-timber beams and lintels of pueblo architecture, their patina constantly changing. The look of the stacked walls of uncut stone, patterned with moss and lichen, also shifts with the light.\n\nThe residence's constant sense of change, the materials drawn largely from nature, delights its owners. \"We've always loved interesting and surprising spaces,\" says the husband. \"The richness of the steel is like a new palette all the time, and just as the seasons change, the house is always changing too. There's an intimate yet almost sacred sense of space.\"\n\nNature was the thoughtful, soft-spoken architect's perpetual guide. The ceiling heights were determined by views of the mountains and clouds. The approach to the house wends its way past a rough-hewn stone wall and entrance walk, inset with native grasses and Minimalist sculpture. The master bedroom looks out to an inner courtyard crisscrossed by water channels designed by landscape designer Julia Berman.\n\nThe couple enjoy being \"wanderers\" in the residence, says the wife, observing the patterns of light and watching distant storms. The home is one that fully embraces the natural world. \"It's a house that really makes you look,\" she says."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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