It is difficult to know what to make of this book. The author’s intentions are ambiguous, at best. It is entitled Style in Mexican Architecture; the preponderance of illustrations are of religious buildings erected since the Conquest; yet the text is strongly directed toward the pre-Conquest era. Unfortunately, the author’s prose style represents a classic example of pseudo-intellectual pretension. It sounds as if he had read Thomas Aquinas, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Lucius Beebe before lunch and written this book in the afternoon. There are passages of purple prosody which would make Mencken pale (or rouse him to riotous rebuttal). Witness: “Likely there are Islamic implications to be surmised here, since the elaborated framework of the whole façade is an end in itself, and contains almost no iconographie designations, except, of course, the statement of order and power on a structure from the midst of which the Espiritu Sanctu pours forth. The deep rich shadows of these forms speak of an immediacy of order” (p. 99).
Richard Aldrich meant well, but the ostentation of his language is simply sophomoric. It would be pointless to analyze such a book’s content, as apart from its expression. Suffice it to quote: “Texcoco was suffocated by cabals behind altars, and the Aztecs were shamelessly putting pieces of cults and other cultural debris together to make themselves respectable. Teotihuacan itself was a buried site for nomads of near-paleolithic Mazapan ways. But Tenochititlan was in full bloom, to the state already, as someone has said, of bread and circuses” (p. 3). Such half-digested assumptions from archaeology, anthropology, and history may sound meaningful in a ten o’clock college lecture to undergraduates; rolled into this fantastic American-made aesthetic tortilla, they can only cause convulsions of laughter.
The production of the book is mediocre. Accents are erratic or nonexistent; this is inexcusable in a work that apparently involves such profound erudition. Well-known names are misspelled or misunderstood. Plate XXVIII-A is not Santo Domingo in Oaxaca, but the church of La Soledad. (Anyone who can put the same caption on two different church façades, on facing pages—Plates XXVIII and XXVIII-A—shows little regard for accuracy, not to mention style.) The illustrations are muddy, although perhaps the intention was that they be muted. The crowning absurdity of production is the use of perforated pages, permitting endless combinations of text (below) and illustrations (above). The combinations may be endless, but so is the verbal pomposity of the writer.