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eBook
Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza
2013
Overview
The plaza has been a defining feature of Mexican urban
architecture and culture for at least 4,000 years. Ancient
Mesoamericans conducted most of their communal life in outdoor
public spaces, and today the plaza is still the public living room
in every Mexican neighborhood, town, and city-the place where
friends meet, news is shared, and personal and communal rituals and
celebrations happen. The site of a community's most important
architecture-church, government buildings, and marketplace-the
plaza is both sacred and secular space and thus the very heart of
the community.
This extensively illustrated book traces the evolution of the
Mexican plaza from Mesoamerican sacred space to modern public
gathering place. The authors led teams of volunteers who measured
and documented nearly one hundred traditional Mexican town centers.
The resulting plans reveal the layers of Mesoamerican and European
history that underlie the contemporary plaza. The authors describe
how Mesoamericans designed their ceremonial centers as embodiments
of creation myths-the plaza as the primordial sea from which the
earth emerged. They discuss how Europeans, even though they sought
to eradicate native culture, actually preserved it as they overlaid
the Mesoamerican sacred plaza with the Renaissance urban concept of
an orthogonal grid with a central open space. The authors also show
how the plaza's historic, architectural, social, and economic
qualities can contribute to mainstream urban design and
architecture today.
Publisher
University of Texas Press
Subject
ISBN
9780292719163, 0292719167
