What follows are pictures of two of my favorite sites, slightly more than piles of rocks.
Uxmal is one of two UNESCO heritage sites in the Yucatan. It's a pretty amazing complex. that I'm sure at one time (long before even the Spanish winos and outcasts came) also supported a vast city of more biodegradable buidlings. Like Roman sites, it's a collage of idealized spaces with uncertain relationships to one another but incredible confidence at the local level...
The most well known feature its its piramide mayor, which, apparently unique in Mayan culture, features filleted (or curved for those who don't know ACAD intimately) tapered corners. It is also an uncanny aesthetic similarity to Sant'Elia's works some millenia later.
And, a feature more quotidian to pre-Colombian Mexican architecture in general, an impossible staircase that would make not only my mother cringe with apprehensive pain...
Note too that this is an ACUTISIMO escalera as well. Oh, and that gang up top apparently works at the site and was just bidding thier time with a little fun and exercise (as the stairs are strictly, UNESCO prohibited for climbing here). But who can tell, as none of the officials at any of these sites wear brown shirt and green pants, nor Dudley Do-Right hats either.
And WOW what a sky. Apparently, it's like this, either HOT and HUMID or dumping rain, the whole year round (except May, when it doesn't rain).
Note too the long and composite building, the colonade, which with a few superficial adjustments would look right at home on the Forum.
Speaking of Classical References, it's really incredible how two cultures (two I'm familair with anyway) removed by time and miles, could create incredibly similar architectures at the diagrammatic level. I mean, just look at that cornice! But also, the incredbile horizontality of that LIFTED volume is one of the few architectural cultures I know of that tries to bridge an appreciation for the agricultural landscape (horizontal) and the godly heavens (vertical).And while on the note of incredible idiosyncratic similarities, note how the corbled arch below is damn near exactly the same as that of the Myceaneans. Incredible that our individual, seperate tendencies quite often lead to casi the same solution.
But, not to say blasphemy to the Modernist doctrine I was nutured on, I've started to see how decoration is not mearely for superficial satisfaction but, I believe when practiced in earnest, for communication in anthropomorphic form with whatever we see when we look into the endless abyss (in this case, the jungle aforementioned).
Speaking of anthropomorphism, I can't help but think of Hejduk, especially in Berlin (again in the 'old world') when I see something like this.
But then there are some really fuctional solutions too, like the steps/bleachers below (a pure combintation of the two I never saw at any high school football field)
Even if they were to watch something as abstract, certainly not 'silly', as a ball game...
And this guy had to put in his two cents:
Another thing you cannot help but trip over in the Yucatan, at least where the jungle is cleared for some prime sun bathing on piles of rocks.
On the way from Uxmal to Edzna, I found myself eerily at home...or at least strangely familiar with driving through the mid-American landscape.
Usually in the Yucatan, you see jungle and some villages filled with abborotes and huts like those shown in a previous post, but here I saw vast fields of produce and little prairie houses set back from the road (obviously a fundamental desire of certain building culture distinct from that inherited by the descendents of the Mediterranean and the Mayans, whose decendents build in much the same way as the Tuscans or the early New English). The mirage was only exacerbated by the apperance of two guerros in a little village otheriwse filled by people one wouldn't be so surprised to see in Mexican villages. They were also wearing overalls, something I haven't worn, or really seen, since I was 5 I think and Osh-Kosh-Begosh was still standard vocabulary with my mom in JCPenny. Anyhow, passing by one of these modern agricultural monliths and one of the Langfelsish little farmhouses mentioned above, I saw an ancient old ford pulling from a drive FULL of little blond kiddies and two guerros afront, and I knew I was no longer dreaming. So next abborotes me and my commrade stopped for some snacks and refreshment and I asked a local what was the deal down the road and here's the story: in the 1930s, there were all kinds of people who had reasons to leave Germany, and some of those were the Menonites, who's only interest in orders, new or old, was that of a well ployed field and a well worn family bible.And then there's Edzna, another city of ancient glory now lost to the Green Ocean but recently uncovered....
We had that place pretty much all to ourselves, only 40 minutes from the city of Campeche. Damn, I love looking around in Mexico. especially now that both the Swine Flu and tourism have slowed damn near to a halt.
\Edzna is also a great site, very unique. Look at those curves to the left! And all those little rooms on the face! Obviously there must have been some crazy light shows for the crowd in the Zocalo back in the day, as there are even now (only now for the tourists, and for a fee).
Pero, speaking of such events, I couldn't help but notice at Edzna the opposite/facing staircase/bleachers resmbled the Nurmberg Zepplin fields. I guess power generally manifests itself in casi the same ways in all kinds of places and times.
But we all know that shit ain't sustainable anymore.
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