Design Build

The Visitor Center sits on Nine Mile Hill, where Central Avenue climbs out of Albuquerque and the old highway runs west. Bernalillo County built it over five years. The City of Albuquerque opened it to the public in April 2026, the year Route 66 turned a hundred.

I designed the entire interior.

The building arrived as rooms. What it needed was the road: the feeling of standing on 66 in its own decade, with the mountains waiting at the end of it. Every surface had to carry that and still work as a public room, one that people walk through, gather in, and bring their kids to.

It starts underfoot. I replicated the highway surface and ran it through the building, so a visitor stands on 66 itself. The road markings do the wayfinding: they guide people through the space without a sign telling them to, point them at the exhibit hall, and break into a bright crosswalk where the restrooms are. Route 66 badges are set into the road at several points. I placed each one where the picture works, so a visitor knows exactly where to stand.

Then the Sandias, a hundred feet long and thirty feet high at the tallest point. The sky reaches overhead first, a vivid blue that makes people stop. The mountains take over from there and carry the eye down the hall into the rest of the exhibit space. The mural does from above what the road does underfoot.

One space in the original plan never resolved. Rather than leave it awkward, we built a temporary wall across it and gave it a job while the city works out what the space should become. Dante Betsch designed the mural that went on it, a coloring book view of Albuquerque packed with its landmarks, and we finished the whole wall in a dry-erase coating. Visitors color it in, it wipes clean, and it keeps working for years.

The theater facade was a chance to make promotion fun. Four poster boxes and an overhead marquee give the center real places to put its events and exhibits, so the wall entertains and informs at the same time. It also carries the strongest step back in time in the building: the marquee lands a visitor in Old Albuquerque on sight.

The exhibit hall is the big room, and it is built to change. The center will rotate exhibits through it over the years, so the space had to hold whatever comes next rather than one fixed display.

Inside it, a room given over to lowrider models. I designed the cases. Sam Torres, another local artist, designed the artwork across their fronts. The center is teaming up with local artists to build replicas of classic lowriders for it, so the room fills in over time instead of arriving finished.

The postcard wall is another of Dante's designs, a three-dimensional diorama built from images in the Albuquerque Museum's photo collections. Lowriders run along the front of it, driving down the road, putting a visitor back on old 66 the way the floor already has.

The end wall of the hallway carries the asphalt and striping up off the floor and keeps them going, so the road appears to run off into the distance. It is a deliberate nod to the New Mexico cartoon gags where a painted road carries straight on into a wall. Up close it is paint. It only becomes a road from the far end of the building.

It is the largest interior I have designed, and the road is the spine of it: it starts underfoot, tells people where to go, and ends as a horizon painted on a wall.

Design and feasibility studies for projects that move from a digital model to a made object. Each one below shows the working method as much as the result: what gets drawn, what gets figured out along the way, and what the shop ends up with.