Architecture and Urbanism in Viceregal Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries by Juan Luis Burke (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Architecture and Urbanism in Viceregal Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries by Juan Luis Burke Luis J. Gordo Peláez Juan Luis Burke, Architecture and Urbanism in Viceregal Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries ( New York: Routledge, 2021). Pp. 232; 50 b/w illus. $170.00 cloth, $48.95 paper. The opening salvo of this study dismantles the myth that traditionally fashioned the Mexican city of Puebla as the quintessential Spanish colonial settlement devoid of Indigenous contribution to its urban design and built form. Architectural historian Juan Luis Burke argues that the Indigenous legacy and presence were deeply ingrained in early modern Puebla from the very conceptualization of the city. Through five chapters, the architectural history of New Spain's second largest city after the viceregal capital is scrutinized in a chronological sequence, [End Page 141] from its founding in 1531 to the baroque transformation of its built environment in the 1700s. The book starts with Puebla's founding and settlement, intended as a Spanish agrarian community embedded in a densely populated Indigenous land. As with other Spanish colonial urban experiments, Puebla emerged as an enterprise in which the state and the church joined forces. The negotiated nature of its early history is stressed in regard to its strategic location, its multiethnic population, and the roots and development of its urban form. By revisiting primary city accounts and historiography on early colonial Mexico and urban design, Puebla's incipient grid model is reassessed in light of the region's Indigenous presence and the pre-Hispanic planning and building traditions. Burke reevaluates the case of pre-Hispanic Cholula, one of the leading Indigenous centers in the area prior to the Spanish colonization, where urban form (along with enduring cultural practices) might have exerted some influence in the design and physical structure of colonial Puebla. A review of the history of royal instructions, urban ideals, and experiences also draws attention to the Franciscan missionaries, who were receptive to medieval theories on urban planning and instrumental in the city's identification with the heavenly Jerusalem, a move that resonated with similar evocations in other colonial cities. In Puebla, this was reinforced by an architectural Via Crucis that reimagined the Mexican city as Jerusalem. The dozen preserved chapel stations and their topographical reenactment comprise a fairly unknown and almost complete architectural ensemble that is here brought to light. Next, Burke traces the reception of Renaissance urban theory and classicizing forms in late sixteenth-century Puebla by delving into the vibrant and sprawling city's built environment, the patrons and architects involved in its shaping, and the images and books that circulated in this Novohispanic region. A "distinctive regional architectural tradition" is argued for Puebla, one that renders obsolete a Eurocentric reading of Renaissance architecture in the Ibero-American world (82). Instead, the early colonial artistic forms and cultural practices are rooted in a transatlantic context of exchange and transformation that remains understudied in its building history. In Puebla, Indigenous craftsmanship and labor proved essential in the construction of the colonial city, where native builders and masons enjoyed prerogatives that sharply differentiated the practice of the building profession from that of Mexico City. The poblano enthusiasm for a classicizing aesthetic is explored in other visual, documentary, and built forms. Of particular interest is the case of Andalusian Luis Lagarto, whose biblical miniatures denote his fluency with this Italianate vocabulary and a receptive clientele to a language that came to signify the imperial agenda of the Spanish monarchy and its viceregal institutions. The book collections of the Jesuit college and the Palafoxiana libraries further enrich the discussion. What intrigues Burke are the annotations in two sixteenth-century editions of Vitruvius's architectural treatise, traces left by informed individuals with building experience and familiarity with classical architectural orders. This handwritten evidence indicates that the unknown readers were interested in pressing matters for city alarifes (chief architects), such as water technology and infrastructures. Despite its mutilated state today, the Casa del Deán, the residence of the head of the cathedral chapter, is also a remarkable example of the classical vocabularies taking root. The designer of the house remains unidentified...