Enclave of Inclusion
Enclave of Inclusion
UD 742, Spring 2015 UD 742 Capstone Studio Assistant Professor McLain Clutter Spring 2015, Monday-Friday 1pm-5pm
Following Hernan Cortes’s 1521 conquest of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital on the current site of Mexico City’s Centro, the expedition produced a map of the city that bears striking similarities to prior representations of Thomas More’s Utopia. Drafted in 1524 and included in a letter from Cortes to his sovereign, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the drawing depicted Tenochtitlan as an enchanted urban island. Objectified by encompassing lakes, the city was severed from the surrounding landscape, offering itself as an object of projective imagination. Apparently, Tenochtitlan appeared both exotic and familiar to the invaders – recalling a European city in its gridiron organization, civic monuments and formal hierarchy, and yet sufficiently alteric to solicit imagination of alternate social and political practices within. The Cortes drawing soon found resonance in the European discourse on ideal cities during the late-renaissance. According to some accounts, the German artist Albrecht Durer drew upon the depiction of Tenochtitlan in his own representations of ideal cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Images and associations of Tenochtitlan were soon complexly intertwined with utopic urban imaginaries.