From Mexico to the World: Architectural Theory and Historiographic Internationalism

This paper considers the utility, risks, and methodological implications of transferring a theoretical framework developed to describe a nationally-specific architectural theory to a comparative study of buildings in multiple countries. Centered on the concept of architectural archaism, the paper takes as its point of departure the translation of Mexican architect Alberto Arai’s theory of the origin of Maya temples (1949) into a method for linking and understanding very different buildings in the US, Uruguay, Brazil, France, Germany, England, Japan, and Jerusalem, all designed by different architects in the mid-twentieth century. In analyzing the shift from a nation-centered reading of architecture to a global, or at least multi-national one, through a concept—archaism—developed to describe formal characteristics and affective qualities, the paper reflects on the challenges of attempting to respond to the call to write global architectural histories given the embeddedness of Eurocentrism in modernist architectural theory as it was received and interpreted outside of Europe, and the historical reality of architects’ immigration from and travel to Europe. It further considers the example of archaism and the global turn in architectural history in light of the historiographic legacy of the International Style exhibition (1932) and perceived demands of twenty-first-century academia.