Architecture
With thirty-one sites, Mexico has more sites on the UNESCO World Heritage list than any other country in the Americas, most of which pertain to the country's architectural history. Mesoamerican architecture in Mexico is best known for its public, ceremonial and urban monumental buildings and structures, several of which are the largest monuments in the world. Mesoamerican architecture is divided into three eras, Pre-Classic, Classic, and Post-Classic.
The Spanish Colonial Style dominated in early colonial Mexico. During the late 17th century to 1750, one of Mexico's most popular architectural styles was Mexican Churrigueresque, which combined Amerindian and Moorish decorative influences.
The Academy of San Carlos, founded in 1788, was the first major art academy in the Americas. The academy promoted Neoclassicism, focusing on Greek and Roman art and architecture.
From 1864 to 1867, during the Second Mexican Empire, Maximilian I installed emperor of Mexico. This intervention, financed largely by France, was brief, but it began a period of French influence in architecture and culture which lasted well into the 20th century.
After the Mexican Revolution in 1917, idealization of the indigenous and the traditional symbolized attempts to reach into the past and retrieve what had been lost in the race toward modernization.
Functionalism, expressionism, and other schools left their imprint on a large number of works in which Mexican stylistic elements have been combined with European and North American techniques, most notably the work of Pritzker Prize winner Luis Barragán.
Enrique Norten, the founder of TEN Arquitectors, has been awarded several honors for his work in modern architecture. His work express a modernity that reinforces the government's desire to present a new image of Mexico as an industrialized country with a global presence.
Other notable and emerging contemporary architects include Mario Schjetnan, Michel Rojkind, Tatiana Bilbao, Isaac Broid Zajman and Bernardo Gómez-Pimienta, Luis Vicente Flores, Alberto Kalach, Daniel Alvarez, and José Antonio Aldrete-Haas.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Mexico
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider, and should be wise in season and not fetter himself with duties which will embitter his days and spoil him for his proper work.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)