5 min read · May 13, 2020
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Mexico’s older (Spanish) areas have been around for 500 years. Many downtowns are still the original buildings.
View of Taxco, Guerrero, and important silver mining and jewelry town. The average age of a house here is about 150 years.
U.S. houses are indeed not built to last because they are usually built with wood. Wood gives a lot of flexibility in making modifications, but radical replacements of walls and beams and such are required eventually and without very good care, more than 100 years is asking a lot of a building made out of wood.
And did I mention wood burns in a fire and then there’s no more house?
Aftermath of one of the house fires in Paradise, California. The only thing left standing is the chimney, and it even kept the paint. Guess what it was made of?
Yes, Mexican homes are typically made of brick and/or concrete, and steel rebar — to be fair, in Boston and the older parts of the East Coast there are still many brick constructions, and those are equivalently lasting to the Mexican ones. Brick/mortar/concrete makes modifications very hard or even impossible; opening the walls to add wire? Nope. Taking down a “non-load-bearing wall”? Maybe, but it’s not going to be a two guys with big hammers in a couple hours job, that’s for sure.
And if it burns down, you perhaps review the structure to make sure things didn’t get so hot the steel got weak (very unlikely in a house fire), give it a nice scrub with soap and water, paint over it, put new doors and windows and move right back in.
They have a lot less flexibility, but a lot more of a sense of permanence. Someone from 300 years ago would see a completely different city, but many elements of the skyline they were familiar with would still be there. There’s something comforting in that.
Even without proper care, a hundred years for a Mexican construction is barely scratching the beginning of its life. Just like Romance Europe has millenia-old buildings that are still strong and standing, Mexico uses the same type of construction (and did before Europeans arrived, which is why pyramids, which haven’t been maintained in 500 years, are still (without paint or finishes anymore) standing proud.
The pyramid of Chichen Itza is 1,500 years old. Throw some plaster and paint, add a couple windows, and you could easily live there, if you weren’t first arrested for desecrating national monuments.
This is the Mexican National Palace. It is also an extension of the “new homes” of Moctezuma, which means that portions of this building are from earlier than 1519, 500 years ago.
Not far from the national palace is the “House of tiles”, a gorgeous building that is also around 500 years old (as is most of the downtown Mexico City square, which ranges from 400 to 700 years old, depending on what you’re looking at). The tile work is much “newer”, from the 1700s.
The first building Hernán Cortés built in 1523 at La Antigua, Veracruz. After the conquest, it was used as an armory and customs house, then was abandoned in the late 1500s and taken over by the elements when the city of Veracruz moved to its current location, so the trees took over. Zero care for a little over 400 years, but you can see that if you really needed to rehabilitate it, you probably still could if you brought a chainsaw to those trees (maybe use that wood for finishes or furniture inside).
Even if it’s a more “modern” house, this is brick, mortar and steel. Expect this structure to also last hundreds of years, all you need to keep up with is windows and facade refinishes.
I’m biased because there are multiple architects in my friends and family. But Mexican architecture, both before and after conquest and independence, is really an amazing 700+ year journey, and the country has the largest number of sites declared World Heritage sites in the Americas due to their beauty (of which architecture is a big part of), plus it has had its own takes and advancements on architectural styles for longer than our northern neighbor has even existed. It also has more architects per thousand people (1.58) than the UK (0.5), France (0.5), the US (0.34) and Spain (1.1), and the next country with more architects per thousand than Mexico is breathtakingly beautiful Italy (2.4). Many, many people visit and enjoy Mexico at least in part because of its architecture.
So all other things being equal, architects and builders from Mexico are some of the best out there.
