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About the Event
The Aquatic Metropolis offers a nuanced account of Mexico City’s urban development focusing on the visual culture of water—maps, drawings, and paintings by both indigenous and European artists that expose the differing epistemologies shaping Aztec and Spanish approaches to urban planning. Unlike the Aztec, who used causeways to adapt the city to its aquatic environment, the Spanish employed European methods of hydraulic engineering to overcome New World nature. This drainage project served a philosophical purpose: to secure a new historical genesis for Mexico City by rooting it in the history of European antiquity and classical architecture, and by emancipating it from Tenochtitlan’s most iconic feature—water.
About the Author
John López’s research takes a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to examining the visual, material, and spatial practices between early modern Europe and the New World. López earned a Ph.D. from the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at MIT and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago. He is currently writing a book, The Aquatic Metropolis, that examines the centuries-old efforts by the Aztec and Spanish to end catastrophic inundation at Mexico City via image making, urban planning, and environmental change. López’s research has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Social Science Research Council, and the Academic Council of Learned Society, among others.