Although this was created specifically to portray the grandeur of Tenochtitlan, it touches me in a slightly different angle. What I really reflect on is considering this from an urban planning...
Although this was created specifically to portray the grandeur of Tenochtitlan, it touches me in a slightly different angle. What I really reflect on is considering this from an urban planning perspective.
Seeing this recreation really makes me mournful for what we've lost in the way we design our cities. Here is a city, Tenochtitlan, and it uses the same design elements as any Old World city would. The street, the block, the plaza, walkable neighborhoods, and human-scale urban design, these are the common language of city design found all through history.
In Precolumbian times, there was no contact, and certainly not cultural exchange, between Mesoamerica and the Old World. The last common ancestor between a random person in 1490 Spain and a random citizen of 1490 Tenochtitlan would probably be a stone age hunter-gatherer wandering through Central Asia in 30,000 BC or so. Their last common ancestor existed before the first permanent settlements, let alone large cities.
So in terms of urban design, New World and Old World civilizations had completely independent lineages. And yet, they eventually converged to very similar solutions to the problem of how to lay out a city. This shows that there really must be some optimal way to design a city to best meet human needs. Certain features of urban design can innately make you feel comfortable or uncomfortable, safe, or exposed. Through thousands of years of city-building, both New and Old World civilizations eventually converged on some common optimal design elements. In other words, they were able to converge at all because there are some optimal ways to lay out a city that is most compatible with humans needs and desires.
Both sides of the world independently figured out how to create the ideal form for a large-scale human habitat. Our ancestors lived in urban forms like these for millennia. And we just threw it all away the day we learned how to make cars cheap enough for most people to own them. We switched to endless inhuman suburban sprawl. Afterwards, we've planned our cities for the car, and not for human well-being. And then we wonder why everyone is miserable.
The layout of Tenochtitlan could quite easily also have been the urban layout anywhere in Europe or anywhere else in the Eastern Hemisphere. Despite being separated by tens of thousands of years in terms of last common ancestor. Both sides of the planet, through generations of trial and error, eventually figured out how to properly lay out a city to best house human beings. And despite knowing this, we still decided to just throw that legacy away. My God what have we done to ourselves.
This is a website/article made by someone called Thomas Kyle about the former capital of the Aztec empire/Mexica peoples where today lies Mexico city, featuring various images of the really...
This is a website/article made by someone called Thomas Kyle about the former capital of the Aztec empire/Mexica peoples where today lies Mexico city, featuring various images of the really detailed render of the he made of the capital. I think it looks very cool and this city would honestly have definitely been on par with Venice and the other great European cities of the time.
Although this was created specifically to portray the grandeur of Tenochtitlan, it touches me in a slightly different angle. What I really reflect on is considering this from an urban planning perspective.
Seeing this recreation really makes me mournful for what we've lost in the way we design our cities. Here is a city, Tenochtitlan, and it uses the same design elements as any Old World city would. The street, the block, the plaza, walkable neighborhoods, and human-scale urban design, these are the common language of city design found all through history.
In Precolumbian times, there was no contact, and certainly not cultural exchange, between Mesoamerica and the Old World. The last common ancestor between a random person in 1490 Spain and a random citizen of 1490 Tenochtitlan would probably be a stone age hunter-gatherer wandering through Central Asia in 30,000 BC or so. Their last common ancestor existed before the first permanent settlements, let alone large cities.
So in terms of urban design, New World and Old World civilizations had completely independent lineages. And yet, they eventually converged to very similar solutions to the problem of how to lay out a city. This shows that there really must be some optimal way to design a city to best meet human needs. Certain features of urban design can innately make you feel comfortable or uncomfortable, safe, or exposed. Through thousands of years of city-building, both New and Old World civilizations eventually converged on some common optimal design elements. In other words, they were able to converge at all because there are some optimal ways to lay out a city that is most compatible with humans needs and desires.
Both sides of the world independently figured out how to create the ideal form for a large-scale human habitat. Our ancestors lived in urban forms like these for millennia. And we just threw it all away the day we learned how to make cars cheap enough for most people to own them. We switched to endless inhuman suburban sprawl. Afterwards, we've planned our cities for the car, and not for human well-being. And then we wonder why everyone is miserable.
The layout of Tenochtitlan could quite easily also have been the urban layout anywhere in Europe or anywhere else in the Eastern Hemisphere. Despite being separated by tens of thousands of years in terms of last common ancestor. Both sides of the planet, through generations of trial and error, eventually figured out how to properly lay out a city to best house human beings. And despite knowing this, we still decided to just throw that legacy away. My God what have we done to ourselves.
This is a website/article made by someone called Thomas Kyle about the former capital of the Aztec empire/Mexica peoples where today lies Mexico city, featuring various images of the really detailed render of the he made of the capital. I think it looks very cool and this city would honestly have definitely been on par with Venice and the other great European cities of the time.