Time Travel

If I were able to visit any Mesoamerican architectural site, I would have to choose Chichen Itza. This was one I thought I would want to visit before reading more in depth about it this week, but upon learning more about it, I found it even more interesting. The most interesting aspects I found this week are that it seems that Nahua-speaking Toltecs were living in Chichen Itza and thus are responsible for some of the architectural similarties that are found between Tula and Chichen Itza. This way, I feel like traveling in time back to Chichen Itza would allow me to experience not only some of the influences involved in the creation of the majesty of Chichen Itza itself, but also some of the wisdom behind the creation of Tula as well from the Toltecs that were influential in creating Tula that seem to have resided in Chichen Itza. The similarities in the architecture are so distinct that these parallels are able to be drawn, which in and of itself seems fascinating to me.
I've always been interested in the beauty of the Castillo, pictured below.

Two Views of Meso-American Architecture

For this week we are to compare and contrast two separate groups of architecture, one from early Mexico versus one from the Classic Mayan stage.

First I'd like to focus on the grouping of buildings shown below from Mitla in early Mexico.

This photo shows the grouping of the buildings in Mitla, depicting how a couple areas including the ones listed as Grupo Adobe and Grupo de las Columnas have corners that do not meet up, while the other groupings of structures shown have corners that do meet up creating closed structures. Ritual manuscript scenes are painted on the interiors of several of the buildings in the Mitla groupings, as a typical style of decoration for the early Mexican art within the architecture.

Second, I'd like to focus on the photo below as an example of Mayan architecture from the Uxmal area.

In the photo above, you the layout of the structures found at Uxmal in a Classic Mayan fashion, though this grouping has some stylings that are slightly less "classic" in design and function, according to our Kubler text. Note, there is the same parallel of groupings where some have closed corners and a few do not, including the North group shown to the far right of the photo above. Both the Uxmal and the Mitla groupings have negative batters, meaning their facade walls lean outwards, which is a bit of an anomaly in terms of likelihood between the two different sets of historical architecture.

Mixtec Art Reblog of deYoung Blog

http://deyoung.famsf.org/blog/framework-ceremonial-knife-mexico

The above piece is displayed in a blog post about deYoung Museum (San Francisco) and its permanent collection. This is a Mixtec work that they have in their collection displaying some amazing work with the tiling or placement of the "tesserae" pieces to create the lines that indicate the birds head and eye shapes on the handle of the decorative blade.
This work seemed to mimic others we've seen in recent studies not only in the concept of using smaller pieces to create one larger overall image, but in simplicity of the mosaic concept, using small pieces to make any sort of look, whether that is one that is abstract, animal like this one or otherwise. Mixing that level of intricate artwork with such funtionality like in this blade is another hallmark we have seen like in the decorated vessels, etc. These functional items do not require any sort of decoration, they simply could be left as is to do their job, but instead they were made to have a beauty and an intrinsic value while they performed their function as well.