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:
“Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)