G. Richard Garrison - Early Mexican Houses: A Book of Photographs and Measured Drawings

F OUNDED in 1532 by order of the Audiencia Real, a new city known as Puebla was built where the Sierra Madre Range slopes gently to the floor of the great valley, and at some distance south and west from the Capital. Almost immediately it took its place as one of the most important centers of the country, occasionally rivalling even the City of Mexico. Since the middle of the seventeenth century it has been the home of Mexico's glazed tile industry and makes free use of the brilliant colored azulejos in all classes of buildings. The casa de altas or two-story house predominates. Though structural walls are almost always of stone they are frequently faced on the exterior with flat brick, either alone or with glazed tile inserts, and laid up in herringbone and other ingenious patterns, usually in large panels separated by stone belt courses and wide-spaced pilasters of stone. The bricks are usually painted a light color with water paint. Many of the older houses present an appearance almost medieval with their ponderous walls and heavy second floor patio corridors supported on arches swung over massive stone corbels, relieved, however, by a free but excellent use of color and by an occasional fig tree or the magenta blossoms of a bougainvillea whose broken shadows decorate the wall and give a garden look of coolness.

B Y the same decree which made Hernando Cortez Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaco, Charles the fifth made a former Indian town with its newcome Castillian families a cuidad in 1529. The buildings of Oaxaca, constructed to resist the frequent earthquakes common to the valley, are low and massive. In the principal plaza the arches of the portales are unusually short and heavy. Cornices and mouldings are simple, their projections slight, and their scale large. Of the houses, the one-story casa baja is the most representative. A unique feature of many of these is the hooded door and window formed by allowing beams imbedded in the wall to project beyond and form a shelter. Various forms may be traced to the Spanish style called Mude-jar. The use cf wrought iron for grille and barandal is frequent and of excellent workmanship. Often a light porton cf wood secures the privacy of the patio while the great doors of the zaguan stand open through the day