2 Temporal Layers in Archaeological Space

In the middle of the massive Mexico City, an inconspicuous ramp on the far corner of the Zócalo allows access to Templo Mayor. Beside the National Palace and the Metropolitan Cathedral, the greatest temple of the Aztec Empire is not much to look at. It is a pit. Time has taken tolls on Tenochtitlan's centerpiece, but nevertheless the space remains. An overlook behind the Cathedral's tabernacle offers a sweeping view across the preservation site, along with scale models of what was there in Aztec times. But that was a different time in a different city. The temple today has become so much more.

Mesoamerican architectural history, like any history, provides numerous alternative understandings. Rethinking ancient architectural problems provides architects a well-worn path to sophisticated success. For instance, Olgiati draws from the Mayans a framework between the abstract and the non-referential that outlines underlying ideas at play in his architecture.¹ This contrives but one of numerous readings of Mesoamerica's many-layered architecture. Quite literally, as traditions elsewhere added onto, built anew or razed and rebuilt whenever their needs outgrew their existing architecture, the Aztec and their predecessors built atop of what they had. When the Spanish arrived in Tenochtitlan, Templo Mayor towered,² but that had not always been the case. Moctezuma's majesty was the sixth enlargement of the 'original' temple (making it the seventh overall), but the temple Cortés saw and conquered was not a singular incarnation of Templo Mayor: it was every iteration of Templo Mayor, each added over the last.^A As new emperors came to power, they simultaneously buried and built upon the work of their predecessors. The vanity of the throne worked with the advancement of the empire, and the temple stood as a testament to the Aztec timeline.

¹ His example juxtaposes Angkor Wat, an abstraction of mountains, the realm of higher beings and Buddhist thought, with Tikal, a Mayan temple that to him references nothing. However, Teotihuacan and Koh Ker provide an inversion (both in location and imagery) that render his example less than explicit. Mayan architecture often appears less referential today because the thinking behind it was more interrupted. To read more from Olgiati on this, see Markus Breitschmid's "Valerio Olgiati's Ideational Inventory" in El Croquis 156 (April 2015), 16–39 — though it looks as if he may now have a book on the subject as well.

² Estimates put the height of the structure at that time around 60 meters / 200 feet, roughly the same height as the Metropolitan Cathedral today.

^A
The excavated space between two layers of the temple. Photo by author.

This notion did not translate to the European arrivals who operated on the calendar of the Catholic Church. The Spanish dismantled the Aztec temple to provide stone for their own: the Metropolitan Cathedral adjacent to Templo Mayor's remains, and the building that now heads the city's central plaza. The cathedral, one of the oldest churches in the Americas, also speaks to traversing time, though in a less augmented manner. Its construction spans three centuries (1573–1813), beating out Templo Mayor's (ca. 1325–1519) by a half century or so, and its architecture borrows from numerous disparate ecclesiastical styles. In a way, the cathedral acts as additional layers to Templo Mayor, albeit ones reengineered through deconstruction.^B The cathedral certainly has no wish to affiliate with human sacrifices; its sacraments oppose reading the Spanish structures as continuations in Templo Mayor's trajectory.³ Nevertheless, the interpretation comes forth readily through the holy sites' shared Mesoamerican location, material and method.

^B
The tabernacle (left) and the cathedral (right) as read from temple ruins. Photo by author.

³ Bruno Latour & Adam Lowe promote the idea of the trajectory: viewing an artwork in four dimensions. Nothing is static in time or place; everything changes over time. The trajectory bundles the multifarious threads of an artwork into manageable whole. For more, see "The Migration of the Aura or How to Explore the Original through its Facsimiles" in Switching Codes, edited by Thomas Bartscherer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 275–297.

The cathedral avoided this malignment up until the 20th century as Templo Mayor was all but forgotten. While scholars nearly located the great Aztec temple in the 19th century, no large-scale excavation work would begin until 1978, almost five hundred years after the temple's demolition. But Templo Mayor did not rest undisturbed in the meantime: it sank further into its lakebed foundation,⁴ buildings came and went above it and a brick water main was even built through it. As jarring a cut as this duct makes through the site, it provides a perspective found nowhere else in the excavation.^C Visitors, relegated to boardwalks, typically float above and around the ruins in order to avoid further interference. The pipe, an existing interjection, allows one to walk into and through the temple's naked layers, or at least the ones that somewhat remain. After traversing through multiple manifestations of the temple, the walkway turns off the pipe. Cutting through is no longer needed: the second temple remains somewhat intact (as does, presumably, the first temple within it).^D The boardwalk reciprocates by weaving through the revealed details of a reduced Templo Mayor. Although the temple mave have shrunken in stature, it has grown considerably in its temporal presence. Each layer, from the buried center to the removed cathedral, pulls visitors further into the history and trajectory of the building.

^C
A turn-of-the-century water main paid no heed to strange stones as it lay way for a better tomorrow in Mexico City. Photo by author.

⁴ Formerly Lake Texcoco, Mexico City sinks into the earth every passing day. Templo Mayor's Aztec design, with its wide base and uniform footprint, accounts for its situation. The Metropolitan Cathedral, meanwhile, has undergone major preservation work as its imported methods buckle on the unstable 'ground.'

^D
The lopsided remnants of the second Templo Mayor. Photo by author.

Before the boardwalk loops back across the excavation site and returns to Zócalo and city life, a museum intercedes. Designed by renowned Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, the Museo del Templo Mayor stands as a neutral backdrop to the ruins. Ramírez Vázquez knows that here is neither the time nor place to build an architectural wonder — for those interested in iconic museums and Mesoamerican icons, visit his National Museum of Anthropology — as the architectural wonder already existed in Templo Mayor. The museum serves to house all those things the temple no longer can.^E Its intermissive situation along its subject's walkways provides further proof of its subservience. The museum's interior, entirely black, focuses the view on the illuminated objects and history on display. Even where he flourishes (e.g. with a central atrium or a two-story void),^F Ramírez Vázquez does so with an eye towards the artefacts. With a longing gaze, he joins in above Templo Mayor.

^E
A restored frieze. Photo by author.

^F
The atrium as seen through a two-story void. Photo by author.

Tracing Templo Mayor's upward trajectory today, we more often than not collide into the green space frame that shades its fragile remains.^G The frame, floating just off the worn masonry, reminds visitors of the ongoing efforts to recover, preserve and display the loss of Templo Mayor as known to the Aztecs. It points to a promising future where leaders add more layers to this monument of Mexico's story. Again we find the temporal core of Templo Mayor: it has embodied its own trajectory. The space of Templo Mayor, once the heart of Tenochtitlan's Sacred Precinct, remains rich with time's omnipotence.^H How it was, is and will be all shrink into the ephemeral experience of a single visit without abandoning the stones that tell its tale.^I Traversing the excavation today provides constant insight into and experience of numerous Templo Mayors, each but one of the single ever-growing entity.

^G
The canopied space that explores the second Templo Mayor. Photo by author.

^H
The rewriting, preserving, forgetting and recovering of history showcase the four-dimensionality of Templo Mayor's space. Photo by author.

^I
Curtain detail on canopy with the Metropolitan Cathedral and a wall of decorated sacrificial skulls in the background. Photo by author.