San Francisco de Asis Mission Church is a church built between 1772 and 1816 by Franciscan Fathers and its patron is Saint Francis of Assisi. It is located on the plaza in Ranchos de Taos, itself a historic district named Ranchos de Taos Plaza, about four miles southwest of the town of Taos, New Mexico. This Church continues to this day to be a place of worship and an integral part of the community.

It was the subject of paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, and photographs by Ansel Adams and Paul Strand. Georgia O'Keeffe described it as, "one of the most beautiful buildings left in the United States by the early Spaniards." It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1970. It is also designated as a World Heritage church.

* Adobe: Is a natural building material made from sand, clay, water, and some kind of fibrous or organic material (sticks, straw, and/or manure), which the builders shape into bricks using frames and dry in the sun. Adobe buildings are similar to cob and mudbrick buildings. Adobe structures are extremely durable and account for some of the oldest existing buildings in the world. In hot climates, compared with wooden buildings, adobe buildings offer significant advantages due to their greater thermal mass, but they are known to be particularly susceptible to earthquake damage.

Buildings made of sun-dried earth are common in the West Asia, North Africa, West Africa, South America, southwestern North America, and Spain, East Europe and East Anglia, particularly Norfolk known as 'clay lump'. Adobe had been in use by indigenous peoples of the Americas in the Southwestern United States, Mesoamerica, and the Andean region of South America for several thousand years, although often substantial amounts of stone are used in the walls of Pueblo buildings. (Also, the Pueblo people built their adobe structures with handfuls or basketfuls of adobe, until the Spanish introduced them to the making of bricks.) Adobe brickmaking was used in Spain already in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, from the eighth century B.C. on. Its wide use can be attributed to its simplicity of design and make, and the cheapness thereby in creating it. A distinction is sometimes made between the smaller adobes, which are about the size of ordinary baked bricks, and the larger adobines, some of which may be one to two yards (2 m) long. (From Wikipedia).
* Vigas are wooden beams characteristic of older adobe construction in the southwestern United States of America, and commonly encountered for ornamental rather than functional purposes in Pueblo Revival Style architecture. They are significant in the archaeology of the American Southwest, because construction techniques used by ancestral Puebloan peoples have left both intact vigas in some structures, and distinctive holes in cliff faces where cliff dwellings were constructed that have subsequently been lost.

Modern use of the viga as an ornamental, rather than weight-bearing, feature dates to construction of public buildings in New Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. Noted architect John Gaw Meem incorporated ornamental vigas into many of his designs. Contemporary construction in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is controlled by stringent building codes, typically incorporates ornamental vigas. Older structures that have been reconstructed (e.g. the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe) may contain both functional and ornamental vigas. (From Wikipedia).