Race and the Built Environment in the Iberian World, ca. 1400–1800

In his meditations about Peruvian architecture a century after that country’s independence, the twentieth-century architect, urbanist, critic, and historian Emilio Harth-Terré intertwined notions of identity, modernism, and—unlike most of his contemporaries—race.¹ Harth-Terré penned his words before postcolonial theory emerged. Since then, there have been efforts to decenter the field, although amid abiding epistemological challenges. Most of the architectural histories of the American, Asian, African, and European territories of the Iberian world in the period around 1400 to 1800 have centered on canonical architecture and buildings designed by perceived “white” European architects. The implementation of official languages, urban design regulations, and cartography—or the way the world was represented and understood—consistently tried to efface both racial and religious minorities.² Blood purity statutes established segregation between Old Christians and New Christians, the latter being former Jewish or Muslim people forcibly converted to Catholicism. These statutes had a tremendous impact on regulations...