The Continuance Institute

The Houses · H-09

Lantern House

Socorro County, New Mexico · Established 2006 · Limited public program

Lantern House was named for the ordinance it spent four years helping to draft, and not for anything more interesting than that.

Region
North America
Residential places
13
Residence
Thirteen places, in periods of five to twelve days; the volunteer rota asks for longer.
Recurring form
The house keeps the Open Table twice in the year, and no more.
Fabric
Step-free throughout. Summer heat is a real constraint on all work at the house.

This is a register entry. No address, telephone line, or arrangement to visit is published here, and none can be taken up through this website.

The house

The house was established in 2006 in a low adobe building on the edge of the town, with the practical aim of housing volunteers for the county's palliative service, which had none.

Night-sky work followed from the location and from an astronomer resident who pointed out that the town's lighting was both wasteful and illegal under an ordinance nobody had enforced. The house drafted a replacement with the county, and it passed in 2012.

Desert restoration is done with a tribal environment department and a state agency; the house holds neither the expertise nor the authority, and its residents work under direction.

Six adults around a table examining a shielded outdoor light fitting, one taking notes.
Lighting clinic, Lantern House.
A group of about twenty adults setting a long table outdoors beside a low building, carrying plates and folded cloths; the photograph is faded and the horizon is featureless.
Residential gathering, western property, date uncertain.

The work

Observance kept here

A kept silence

The hour after the evening meal is kept in silence. Residents returning from an overnight sit are excused it, and usually take it anyway.

The shared forms, here

The Repair Table
Fixtures, shades, and shielding, worked at the shield bench and logged against the county ordinance file.
The Boundary Walk
A night route through the streets nearest the house, recording failed and over-bright fixtures instead of fencing.

The house year

The house, day to day

Cooks before dawn and after dark and hardly at all between. From June the house works a shifted day and the kitchen with it; the midday meal in high summer is bread, fruit, and a great deal of water, which is a heat rule and not a preference.

Adobe and a metal roof at 1,400 m, built 1961 and taken on in 1996. Thermal mass does the work of air conditioning until July, when it does not. Water is trucked in during drought years and the house publishes when it is.

Rooms
The dark room, The porch room, The long room, and the usual others (9 in all).
In the kitchen
The night pot. Beans, chile, and cornmeal, eaten at ten at night after the lighting clinic. Made in the cool of the morning and held.
Outstanding
Adobe render, west elevation — Re-rendered by hand with the town. The date is fixed for April and moves for nobody. Evaporative cooler — Pads replaced each May. Uses water the house does not always have, which is the honest reason July visits are not arranged. Cistern and gutters — Cleaned before the monsoon. A missed year costs the house a season's water.
Said here
“Before the heat.” — Early, and not negotiable.
Local custom
The wrong green. A door painted the wrong colour in 2015, now used as a unit of measurement for institutional delay.

The life of a house

Local participation

Separation
Notice once. Drivers in separation are removed from the list the same day so that nobody is waiting on a car that is not coming.

A life in the practice
The term a steward holds, and its limits

The steward

Delia Marquez

Retired civil servant · steward since 2019

Thirty-one years with the state land office. Drafted most of the ordinance and will tell you it was mostly other people.

Records

Other houses

Elsewhere in the catalogue

Related records

Entry H-09 · reviewed 11 February 2026