Art: South of the Border

About all the untraveled U.S. layman knows of Latin-American architecture is a style called “mission,” of which the U.S. itself has monuments in California and the Southwest. But the frontier simplicity of the Spanish missions stands in almost the same relation to the glories of Latin-American architecture as the stockade fort to the refined colonial of New England and the South. A comprehensive exhibition arranged by Architectural Historian Talbot Faulkner Hamlin, of Latin America’s rich architectural tradition was running last week in the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University. Some 200 photographs and reproductions of drawings, arranged in showcases and neatly labeled, outlined the development of architecture south of the Rio Grande, from its massive stone beginnings in the temples of the Mayas to the international Classic Revival buildings of the early 19th Century. The exhibition showed the layman a number of things about the architecture of the Western Hemisphere that he never knew before:

>That the Hemisphere’s richest melting pot of past architectural styles is Mexico, which is today a museum of native, European and Asiatic styles.

>That the elaborate tilework found on old Mexican buildings had its origin in the Moorish civilization of the Middle Ages.

>That a great deal of the decoration in the interiors of Mexican churches shows Cambodian and East Indian influence, from samples brought to Mexico from the “Indies” by 16th-and 17th-Century Spanish traders.

>That Aztec craftsmen, who decorated every available square inch of their Spanish Gothic and baroque churches, created a native hybrid style known as Mexican churrigueresque, which in turn influenced the baroque and rococo architecture of Spain.

>That the screened wooden balconies that jut from the walls of old Peruvian palaces in Lima and elsewhere, are patterned after those of East Indian harems.

>That one Latin-American building, the great cathedral in Mexico City, contains the whole stratified history of Latin-American architecture on and within its four walls; it has Aztec foundations, a 16th-Century Gothic ceiling, baroque and churrigueresque chapels, Moorish tile-work, East Indian decorative motifs, is yet one of the most harmoniously beautiful structures in the Western Hemisphere.

White-bearded, beaming Talbot Hamlin, an architect who has built houses, banks and colleges from Nanking to Manhattan, settled down eight years ago as librarian of the Avery Library to view architecture from the sidelines and to write the finest popular book (Architecture Through the Ages; Putnam; $6) in English on its history. Though he views the past greatness of Mexican architecture with a historian’s enthusiasm, he believes that the best contemporary Latin-American architecture is being done by the Argentines and Brazilians, who today are rivaling the finest modern architects of the U.S. and Europe.