Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza: From Primordial Sea to Public Space (Roger Fullington Series in Architecture)

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Description

The plaza has been a defining feature of Mexican urban architecture and culture for a minimum of 4,000 years. Ancient Mesoamericans conducted most of their communal life in out of doors public spaces, and nowadays the plaza is still the public living room in each Mexican neighborhood, town, and city—the place where friends meet, news is shared, and personal and communal rituals and celebrations happen. The web page 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 brand new 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 up to date 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, although they sought to eradicate native culture, in fact 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 give a contribution to mainstream urban design and architecture nowadays.

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