From Aztec to High Tech: Architecture and Landscape Across the Mexico-United States Border (Creating the North American Landscape)

The United States and Mexico share a two-thousand-mile boundary where landscape and architecture clash in a vivid contrast of two cultures. From Aztec to High Tech explores the architectural future of interdependent neighbors who share a history, an economy, and a landscape. After reviewing three key periods in Mexico's three-thousand-year-old architectural past -- indigenous, Spanish colonial, and modern -- urban planning scholar Lawrence A. Herzog focuses on the border territories of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, particularly in California.

Through eighty black-and-white photographs and interviews with architects from both sides of the border, this engaging book provides a compelling picture of how traditional Mexican architecture has intersected with the postindustrial, high-tech urban style of the United States -- a mix that offers an alternative to the homogenization of architecture north of the international border.

Lawrence A. Herzog is a professor of city planning in the School of Public Administration and Urban Studies at San Diego State University.