The stepped layers of this senior health services center are set against the backdrop of the Franklin Mountains. By the twenty-first century, the architectural reference is not to a southwestern or Spanish Colonial past (and even then imported from California) but directly to Mexico, the first- and second-generational heritage of most of the region’s population. Architects of twenty-first-century El Paso look to a Mexican source of modernism, Mexico City architect Ricardo Legorreta. This project, in particular, adapts his vocabulary of heavy, coarsely stuccoed walls pierced with deep square openings, grids of small openings, battered forms, and intense colors to a complex functional program and difficult site. Commercial, institutional, and residential projects in the area have adopted vivid coloration as a new local identity.