The Story of Architecture in Mexico

VISITORS to Mexico often ask why it was possible for the Spaniards to build more grandly in .sixteenth-century Mexico than in our Southwest two centuries later. Part I of Sanford’s welcome one-volume history of Mexican architecture answers that question with an extraordinary amount of well-observed detail: the monks who followed the conquerors found hundreds of thousands of artisans already trained in a great tradition of building.

Concentrating on the more accessible ruins of the ancient races, the author — himself a practicing architect with a camera eye — describes the development of the indigenous architecture from the building of the oldest monument in our hemisphere, the archaic Pyramid of Cuicuilco, near Mexico City, to the Aztec decadence. All the great builders are there: the Maya, the so-called Olmecs, the Mixtecs and Zapotees, the “mysterious” Toltees, and the newly discovered Toltec kinsmen, the Matlatzincas of the Toluca basin.

After a brief account of the architectural styles of Catholic Spain — Gothic, Mudéjar, Renaissance, Plateresque, baroque, Churrigueresque — Sanford describes their reappearance in colonial Mexico. Of some four hundred monastic houses founded by the Franciscan, Dominican, Carmelite, and Augustinian Fathers in the sixteenth century, he takes the reader on vivid and leisurely visits to such delightful examples as the quasiGothic and Plateresque convents of Actopan, on the highway into Mexico City, and Acolman, near the Toltec pyramids of the Sun and the Moon; the Plateresque convent of Tepoztlán, with its droll native ornaments; the stunning Gothic and Romanesque and Moorish convent at Huejotzingo, on the highway to Puebla. (New roads have lately made a number of unmentioned conventos easy to see: Atlatlahuacan, decorated in pink and magenta, and Oaxtepec, frescoed with the black and white figures of Dominican saints, and Santo Domingo, in Yanhuitlán, on the new road to Oaxaca.

The baroque, ultra-baroque, and neoclassical churches and palaces out in the provinces are explored with great taste and scholarship and against a lively historical background. The book will explain why so many baroque churches in the Tresguerras country have quasi-Doric interiors: just as elsewhere, Spanish baroque was inventively finished off in the natively florid elaboration of the Churrigueresque style — the style which Sacheverell Sitwell characterizes as having “fluttering edges.”

The work is usefully and excitingly illustrated by 106 photographs and 12 maps and drawings.

MACKINLEY HELM