Review by Choice Review
The multivalence of public monuments is an important and current interpretive lens in architectural history. This book centers on Havana's Plaza des Armas, after 1828 dominated by a substantial Doric-fronted temple called El Templete. The temple and the three monumental history paintings it houses mark the site in popular memory where the Spanish colonizers celebrated their first mass and undertook their first cabildo--town council--in 1517. But as Neill (Florida State Univ.) works through the chapters of the book to explain, identity in this space was neither monolithic nor stable. The author rightly interprets the construction of heritage in this case through the lens of the racial and political moment of its production; the assessment of an early modern, multiracial, colonial, slave-dependent context lends itself particularly well to this cause. That said, the book overreaches at times and wanders into peripheral and only tangentially related territory, especially in the opening chapters. As an effort to understand Cuban architecture as both a component of the larger Spanish Empire and a product of its immediate political condition, the book is an important contribution to the history of architecture in Cuba. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers. --Louis P. Nelson, University of Virginia
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
