From Aztec to High Tech

The United States and Mexico share a 2000-mile boundary where landscape and architecture clash in a vivid contrast of two cultures. This is an exploration of the architectural future of interdependent neighbours who share a history, an economy and a landscape in the borderlands of northern Mexico and the south-western United States. After reviewing three key periods in Mexico's 3000-year-old architectural past - indigenous, Spanish colonization, and modern - author Lawrence A. Herzog then focuses on the border territories of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, particularly the California border region. He traces southwestern architecture from its origins to present-day barrios and illegal living spaces in Mexican immigrant neighbourhoods. Through 80 black-and-white photographs and interviews with architects from both sides of the border, this is a picture of how traditional Mexican architecture has intersected with the post-industrial, high-tech urban style of the USA - a mix that offers an alternative to the homogenization of architecture north of the international border. North America, Herzog notes, is in a crisis of urban space and place. By incorporating design traditions from Mexico's indigenous and Spanish colonial periods into new building in the borderlands and beyond, the southwest may be spared the corporate blandness that contributes to the sense of placelessness in other urban areas in the USA.