Santa Elena Noria Interpretation

In February 2017, I was able to travel to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico alongside my fellow UT students in preservation, planning and landscape architecture. For me, this was an awesome opportunity to observe a built tradition that adapted to climate, and emphasized color and materiality. One of the most inspiring and lasting lessons of my time in Mexico was the blurred boundaries between interior and outdoor spaces.

During our visit to the town of Santa Elena, we were able to visit the sunny open plaza, see examples of traditional Mayan homes and colonial architecture. Finally, we visited a historic well site that had undergone a recent reconstruction effort. Fellow MSHP student Kathryn Clarke and I were extremely interested in the well site, called a Noria, both as an example of a cultural gathering place and as a historic technological site. Throughout the city of Santa Elena, we observed that the natural gathering places were the sunny, open plaza, the grassy yards surrounding the church, and several sport courts. A basketball court had also been constructed adjacent to the historic noria.

Kathryn and I believed that the noria was likely an important gathering place in the history of the town, especially for domestic use. The other gathering spaces in Santa Elena can be characterized as masculine, commercial, or dominated by religious overtones. Additionally, we knew water access and quality to be omnipresent issues in Mexico. By incorporating a modern need for clean drinking water with a historic well site, the site becomes not only a new gathering place but one with a strong historic context. Kathryn and I felt that rehabilitating and reusing the noria site as a natural communal space would be the best potential use for this heritage resource.

The Santa Elena noria is a locally significant site for several separate reasons: the innovative technology involved in its design, the social importance of it as a source of communal water, and the masonry craftsmanship involved in the creation of the noria. The word ‘noria’ is used to describe the site because that is the terminology adopted for the type of waterwheel in this region of Mexico, and how the site was described by local archaeologists. However, the term ‘noria’ generally refers to a water wheel that draws water from a moving river or stream, while a ‘sakia’ draws from a well and is often driven by animal power. The technology came over from Europe with Spanish colonizers.

The Santa Elena noria itself was the site of an extensive reconstruction effort in 2015, including the installation of a safety grate over the open well and the restoration of crumbling masonry. The wooden superstructure of the well was not recreated, and with our interpretation we sought a way to show how that mechanism would have existed at the site without reconstruction of the mechanism itself. Instead, we proposed drilling a new well, and installing a simple chlorination and storage system at the site. Water from this system would be available through several taps, so that community members could collect safe drinking water without the economic and environmental expense of purchasing bottled water.

In order to achieve legibility at the site, we proposed using several glass panels that intersect with the site’s masonry. The etched glass would be lit from the edges using efficient LED lighting, which could be powered using solar energy captured at the site. Those panels would tell the story not only of the historic well and its function, but also the geology of the site, and the 21st century chlorination system.