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Foreword: Hispanic sacred geometry and the architecture of the divine.

Article Excerpt
The exploration of drawings and of their properties gives rise, through the semiotic mediation of dynamic geometry, to the recognition of a system of geometric relationships, which in the final analysis constitute the geometric object.

Moreno Armella and Sriraman (2004: 1)

In the mid- to late 1970s, I first embarked on a course of undergraduate study and publication centered on the analysis of architectonic forms specific to the pre-Hispanic monuments of highland central Mexico (Mendoza 1975, 1977). Those studies fueled my quest to understand the sacred architectures and traditions of the Mexica/Aztec and related Mesoamerican peoples. Upon undertaking graduate studies at the University of Arizona, however, I was soon dissuaded from furthering this course of research due to the paucity of support for such study in the Department of Anthropology. In time, I found myself drawn to architectural traditions specific to those peoples and cultures that I came to see as consonant with my own Hispanic and Mexican Indian cultural heritage (Mendoza and Tortes 1994; Mendoza 2002a). As such, much of my academic career has been devoted to explorations pertaining to sacred geometry and the architecture of the divine, or most recently, solar Eucharistic worship and the geometry of light (Mendoza 2005). And so it is that this invited review of the work of Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller necessarily draws on a reservoir of understandings that bridge the Hispanic and Amerindian, intellectual and spiritual, and emic and etic dimensions of my life experience and worldview.

HISPANIC ARCHITECTURE

Any essential understanding of the architectural histories of the Hispanic Southwest and Californias owes much to the writings of Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller, whose works constitute a veritable bulwark and reservoir of analysis and interpretation to that end. Her signal contribution to the architectural history of the California missions, Buildings and Builders in Hispanic California, 1769-1850 (1994), remains the single most comprehensive analysis and architectural biography of the buildings, builders, architects, engineers, master craftsmen, and journeymen who designed and toiled under the weight of that monumental enterprise. Her long history of contributions to the study of professional artisans and architectural practice in the Hispanic Southwest and Mexico is in turn exemplified by Architectural Practice in Mexico City: A Manual for Journeyman Architects of the Eighteenth Century (1987). Not one to settle for mere qualitative assessments of the art history or architectural details of any one site, Mardith Schuetz-Miller has fully devoted her life to the on-site investigation, analysis, and interpretation of many of those California and Southwestern mission settlements that have so dominated her attention these many years.

Tracking the Tradition

From the heart of Mexico City through to the uppermost reaches of Alta California at San Francisco Solano in Sonoma, California, Mardith Schuetz-Miller has personally probed, transcribed, and translated the primary documentary histories and firsthand accounts of the many Hispanic settlements that remain her object of analysis and scholarship. To that extent, her investigations range from early archaeological and architectural assessments at San Antonio de Valero, Texas, to her most recent explorations among the missions of the Sierra Tarahumara. One would think that her longstanding devotion to rediscovering, revealing, and acknowledging the long-lost names and biographies of those Hispanic and Indian architects, builders, and craftsmen who erected the many sites that make up the ecclesiastical topography of missionary settlements in the Hispanic Southwest and Mexico would more than fill...

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