Architecture Deconstructing History

The force of some projects or architectural Works is based on its historic

fundaments. The recurrence to stylistic elements from the past to create objects

in the present fallows the path to offer a product that takes from the

collective taste or from fashion its commercial viability. Never the less, the

solutions that unite those elements generally are based in a poor knowledge

of the original styles and their contexts, which is why the results become an

arbitrary handle of the stylistic elements and works without aesthetic logic.

In Mexico, the Word “colonial” has become an everyday Word, a word of

a huge and inexact use, applied to refer to the mix of several different

styles, from sites in different continents and created in different

times, those elements have in common the fact that they belong to

the past, mostly from the Spanish style in Mexico from the colony (from

the XVII and XVIII centuries), but that also have the baroque, the neoclassic,

the art nouveau and still the art deco from the early XX Century


Some of the elements are more highlighted tan the others when the intention

is to show the building as if it belongs to a determined style.

This way, when its offered as “colonial”, the highlighted element, even

if it is in a modest way, is the Spanish tile. Its place in facades is strategic,

to look like a symbol of identification with a supposed style.

The “Colonial style”, is a reformulation of the “Californian” style, call

Spanish revival” in the United States. Fashions as the actual Californian

style are evidence of how an image based in elements from the past

works as a generator of the urban image and, most of all, from the collective

life. The interesting thing about this real state-urban-architectonical

phenomenon, from a cultural point of view, is the fact of that

the ignorance of the historic elements of architecture it has as an answer

a same demand. The taste, more than the technical knowledge, of

course, the determinant factor is the election of a product, like a house.


By : Tonatiuh Castro Silva

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