Metaphysical conceptions have always influenced how human societies create the built environment. Mexico - with its rich culture, full of symbol and myth, its beautiful cities, and its evocative ruins - is an excellent place to study the interplay of influences on space and place. In this volume, the authors consider the ideas and views that give the constructed spaces and buildings of Mexico - especially, of Queretaro - their particular ambience. They explore the ways the built world helps people find meaning and establish order for their earthly existence by mirroring their metaphysical assumptions, and they guide readers through time to see how the transformation of worldviews affects the urban evolution of a Mexican city. The authors, then, construct a ""metaphysical archeology"" of space and place in the built landscape of Mexico. In the process, they identify the intangible, spiritual aspects of this land. Not only scholars of architecture, but also archeologists and anthropologists - particularly those interested in Mexican backgrounds and culture - will appreciate the authors' approach and conclusions.

"An Essay Concerning the Project" considers the practice of architectural design as it has developed during the last two centuries. In this challenging interpretation of design education and its effect on design process and products, Argentinean scholar Alfonso Corona-Martinez emphasizes the distinction between an architectural project, created in the architect's mind and materialized as a set of drawings on paper, and the realized three-dimensional building.
Corona-Martinez demonstrates how representation plays a substantial role in determining both the notion and the character of architecture, and he traces this relationship from the Renaissance into the Modern era, giving detailed considerations of Functionalism and Typology. His argument clarifies the continuity in the practice of design method through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a continuity that has been obscured by the emphasis on changing goals instead of design procedures, and examines the influences of modernity and the legend of the Bauhaus.
Architectural schooling, he suggests, has had a decisive role in the transmission of these practices. He concludes that the methods formalized in Beaux Arts teaching are not only still with us but are in good part responsible for the stylistic instability that haunts Modern architecture.
Abstract but not abstruse, "An Essay Concerning the Project" provides clear information for a deeper understanding of the process of design and its results. More so than any other recent text, it shows the scope and richness of the field of speculation in architecture. It presents subtle considerations that must be mastered if an architect is to properly use typology, the means of representation, and the elements of composition and in architecture. Students, teachers, and practitioners alike will benefit from its warning about the deeper aspects of the endeavor of architecture.

The countries of Latin America exist within a framework of individuality supported by a unity based on the similar factors of urban population, rural morale, and ethnic conformation. The area is isolated even as it is centrally located in geographical terms, almost in a time warp of culture that mixes the modern with the arcane, the elite with the poor, and the primitive with the sophisticated. The common history, common destiny, and common role in the world inherent to the major countries of Latin America--Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela--justify the efforts of regional architects to create a continental identity.
"Latin American Architecture: Six Voices" is a compilation of profiles of architects, one from each of the six major countries. The essays capture the political and social changes that altered the face of Latin American countries and how the architects who work there continually attempt to balance the old with the new, intimating at the same time the continuity and cultivation of a tradition so persistent in Latin American architecture. In doing so, the artists reveal the two major schools of development: minimalist and tectonic tradition.
Michael L. Tribe and Pablo J. Rodriguez P., along with editors Malcolm Quantrill and Kenneth Frampton, focus on prominent figures in Latin American architecture such as Colombia's Rogelio Salmona, Mexico's Ricardo Legoretta, and Venezuela's Jesus Tenreiro-Degwitz. Their intent is to correct an imbalanced treatment of the region's architecture at the hands of international critics, who lauded Latin America as the proving ground of modernism in the late 1940s but then quickly lost interest.
A refreshing look at some less-famous architects, whose skill is equal to if not greater than that of some stars of the "developed world," "Latin American Architecture" provides an ideal introduction for the architecture student or anyone interested in architecture as a reflection of culture.