Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment // (UN)SETTLEMENTS

Interconnected Lives, Networked Places: New Narratives about Architecture in the Spanish Empire

Jesús Escobar, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University

Jennifer Strtak, Princeton-Mellon Fellow

The history of the built environment in the Americas under Spanish colonialism centered for decades on narratives about the transfer of ideas about architecture and urbanism from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. Over the past twenty years, this trend has shifted as scholars have demonstrated that aspects of urban design in Spain were informed in part by the encounter with Indigenous cities in the Americas and the consolidation of a networked empire of towns over centuries. This talk unsettles the architectural history of Spanish colonialism by focusing attention on individual lived experiences of places in Mexico, Peru, Italy, and Spain. Buildings are primary sources for my project, and I cast a wide net to include monastic churches and civic palaces as well as fortifications and even a leper hospital. What links these varied buildings are the itineraries across the empire traveled by two individuals whose interconnected biographies drive this study. My objective is to write a new kind of architectural history that puts people at the center of the story. The talk draws from a book project tentatively titled “Americans Abroad in the Seventeenth Century: People, Buildings, and the Space of Empire.”

Special funding for this session is provided by the Program in Latin American Studies.

The Spring 2025 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment is kindly sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and the following Princeton University departments and programs: African Studies, Anthropology, Art & Archaeology, Brazil LAB, Center for Collaborative History, Chadha Global India Center, Effron Center for the Study of America, English, French & Italian, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Humanities Council, PIIRS, Program in Latin American Studies, Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the School of Architecture.

Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. Lunch is provided while supplies last.