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WEEK
2. COLONIAL TOWNS AND ORIGIN MYTHS
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Cities as the key to European colonization; continuities, prototypes and experiments; the codification of the Laws of the Indies and the Puritan "city on a hill"; a breakdown of authority.
READING:
George Kubler, "Mexican Urbanism in the Sixteenth Century," Art Bulletin
24 (l942): l60-77
John Archer, "Puritan Town Planning in New Haven," Journal of the Society
of Architectural Historians 34 (l975): l40-49
Recommended:
Stephen Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters (Berkeley, 1993)
Valerie Fraser, The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the Viceroyalty
of Peru, 1535-1635 (Cambridge, l99l)
Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World from the Renaissance
to Romanticism (New Haven, l993)
Graziano Gasparini, "The Spanish-American Grid Plan," The
New City l (l99l), pp. 6-33
Anthony N. B. Garvan, Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut
(New Haven, l95l)
Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America (New York, l992)
QUESTIONS:
l. What are some of the similarities and differences between the colonial
American cities of the Spanish, the British and other European powers
who settled here? Think about spatial order, regulations, social organization,
attitudes toward European and American precedents.
2. How did these various colonial cities accommodate people of different
cultures, nations, races and classes? Can you see evidence of these early
attitudes in the maps of cities? What is the long-term effect of these
early policies and plans?
3. To what extent can we speak about "the" Spanish settlement or "the"
English town? Does this suggest one archetypal model that everyone followed,
or does it suggest that variations were errors, perhaps even corruptions?
4. Is it possible to build tabula rasa, as if nothing else existed either
on the site or in one's own memory?
5. Likewise, is it possible to describe exactly "what is there" in any
city, either with words or images? Are effeots to do deceitful, incomplete,
biased? How then do you judge other people's descriptions? How can you
do the best with your own?