Review: The Architecture and Cities of Northern Mexico from Independence to the Present, by Edward R. Burian

Abstract

Edward R. Burian The Architecture and Cities of Northern Mexico from Independence to the Present Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015, 350 pp., 34 maps, 30 color and 488 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780292771901 Edward R. Burian's newest book not only draws our attention to a startling lacuna in the history of the architecture and urbanism of Northern Mexico but also expertly addresses this scholarly omission. Most architectural histories of Mexico focus on pre-Columbian, colonial, and twentieth-century modern architecture, especially the architecture produced in and around Mexico City. As Burian notes, even canonical books on colonial architecture in Mexico “almost completely ignored colonial architecture north of Zacatecas” (1). Aside from an unevenly implemented 1914 inventory of historic sites in Northern Mexico, undertaken in response to a Mexican federal order, and a skeletal inventory of cultural resources compiled in 1988 by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia in the states of Tamaulipas, Chihuahua, and Nuevo Leon, Burian's book represents the first attempt to document the architecture and urbanism of this region systematically. Burian argues that the industrial character of the region—shaped by historic and economic ties between Mexico and the United States and Europe—has contributed to this elision, since Mexico has often been imagined as “a folkloric antidote to the industrial technology of the United States” (2). The destruction of much of the nineteenth-century fabric of Mexico's northern cities and a lack of comprehensive archives in the region made Burian's task difficult. His archival and field-based research, conducted over ten years in dozens of Mexican cities—sometimes with the expert guidance of local historians—documents for the first time architects in the region such as Carlos Gomez Palacio of Torreon; works in the region by famous architects from the United States and Europe, like Walter Gropius and Myron Hunt; and the intertwined architectural economies of the United States and Northern Mexico, as seen through the work of Alfred Giles and others. With this survey-style architectural guide—the type of publication historian Stephen Fox has termed a “gazetteer”—Burian …