Making an Entrance - teaching architecture - Brief Article

Arts & Activities, March, 2001 by Guy Hubbard

This photograph shows numbers of buttresses, some of which are arch-like ("flying buttresses"). Viewers can also see that in this artistic style, large areas of a building were decorated with carving.

During the last two centuries, the Gothic style of architecture once again became popular, and examples of it can be seen in churches, libraries and other large public buildings throughout the world, including North America. Students may be encouraged to search out entrances to Gothic revival buildings in their own community and compare them with this one in Westminster Abbey.

Church of San Xavier del Bac, Tucson, Ariz. [C] Buddy Mays/CORBIS.

Following the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Roman Catholic priests, called "friars" or padres, spread northward into what today are the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. There they built numbers of mission churches. San Xavier del Bac is close to Tucson, Ariz., and is the most ambitious of all these missions. It remains one of the most beautiful and best preserved. Construction began 300 years ago and took almost 100 years to complete.

The decorative surround to the entrance is called a "facade." It is carved in the decorative Baroque artistic style that originated in Spain and later became popular throughout Mexico. Unlike churches in larger Mexican communities to the south, the building of San Xavier del Bac was built by local Indian workers and is quite plain. The striking contrast between the decorated brown of the portal and the whitewashed brick and stucco of the rest of the building, however, draws attention to the importance of the entrance.

Carved Maori Gateway Structure, Rotorua, New Zealand. [C] Wolfgang Kaehler/CORBIS.

Before the arrival of Europeans, the Maori people of New Zealand were continually at war with their neighbors and lived in fortified hilltop villages. As a result, entrances like this one were small so they could be easily defended.

The top shows a distorted ancestral figure designed to protect the people of the village. It is quite similar to others carved for centuries on Pacific islands wherever Polynesian people lived. The face is a stylized, abstract mask. The tongue sticks out of its large, open mouth in a frightening way. The eyebrows are also exaggerated, while the eyes and nose are quite small. Brightly colored seashells are used for eyes. The body appears to be in a crouching position. The two posts on each side are filled with decorative, abstract patterns.

Relief carving of this kind is also found on Maori war canoes, jewelry, weapons and meeting houses. Originally, carvers worked mostly with sharpened stone tools, while details were cut with flakes of volcanic glass (obsidian). Later, they used steel tools purchased from European settlers. For centuries, the Maori had traditionally colored their carvings with paint that did not dry. Red. a sacred color, was commonly used to paint these carvings. With the European settlers' introduction of paint that hardened when dry, however, Maori artists began to use it instead.