Casa Colonial: The Domestic Architecture of New Granada

Large-format cloth hardcover, English language, second edition, 200 pages, copiously illustrated with primarily colour photos (many full-page), NOT ex-library. Shipping weight over 1.5kg. Minor handling wear, book is clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Untorn, gently shelfworn dust jacket. -- Contents: Introduction; On the Threshold of the 21st Century; Creation and Origins; Character and Atmosphere; Order, Experience and Perception; Legend of Technology; Finding Color and Dominating the Environment; In Praise of Hacienda Houses in the Countryside of New Granada -- "This book explores the truth about colonial houses in the area of New Granada that is now Colombia. What were the origins of these houses, what made them authentic, what was their metamorphosis? Also, what were they really like, what are they like today? Recently, a pseudo-cultural fog has been laid over colonial houses, precluding us from seeing clearly what were the beginnings and principles of house building in New Granada. The austere architecture of the past has been falsified through decoration, and virtues, defects and meanings assigned to it that have little or nothing to do with the houses' intrinsic or environmental significance. So how can we know, after the falsification, defacement or destruction of colonial constructed forms, what is the underlying meaning of these vital parts of the patrimony of a country so caught up with its present - and anxious about its future - that it now has little time and few occasions to go back over its past in search of explanations of its existence and its conduct? It is not possible to properly protect what we ignore or know imperfectly. What is the true face of the humility and virtue of colonial houses? Here, photographs of provenly authentic architecture try to answer this, though of course the houses have grown and changed through 300 years of Spanish colonial dominion in Colombia. These graphic responses accompany a text not directed to the specialized reader, but to all those for whom the past is not a weapon to be used against the future. It is a question of leading the reader to think again about architecture. Perhaps as something more than a perfunctory stage set for the travail of everyday existence; or, why not, as something different from mere housing for some Spaniards - little known and less understood - who arrived centuries ago to parts reminding them of Andalusia, and that received the name of New Granada. I have abandoned here the cultural clichés about colonial construction and confronted the difficult problem of what to do about these houses at the end of the 20th century. The book quotes Colombian chroniclers, writers and poets, and foreign visitors, reconstructing the experience of living in houses that still remain much as they were in previous centuries. I have also tried to put myself in the place and mind of carpenters and masons, to highlight that we are concerned here more with construction-technology - than architecture - esthetics; more with artisans than professionals. That among the former, some had a poetic sense of their craft, is a quite different matter. In colonial construction, truth and beauty march arm in arm. - German Téllez: an architect and Master of Beaux Arts, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, also a historian and restorer of monuments; corresponding member of the Academia Colombiana de Historia and Honorary Collegiate Member of the American Institute of Architects; Professor Emeritus of the History of Architecture, founder of the Centro de Investigaciones Estéticas e Históricas, Universidad de los Andes. Mr. Téllez is a noted photographer of architecture and the author of a number of books on the topic; he contributed chapters to Manual de Historia de Colombia, Nueva Historia de Colombia and Historia del Arte Colombiano, and has participated in several specialized and general interest publications.".…