2026 Theses Doctoral

Building the Enlightenment: Mexico City at the End of Empire

Yuste-Golob, Rebecca M.

This dissertation examines how architecture, science, and the study of nature together shaped the intellectual and material landscape of the Spanish Enlightenment in Mexico City. It asks how buildings and institutions designed for the new sciences structured encounters with the natural world, how architectural forms embodied changing ideas about knowledge and order, and how these transformations unfolded within the political context of a late colonial empire on the verge of independence.

By placing architecture at the center of the history of Enlightenment science, the project reveals how new ways of knowing the earth were inseparable from the spaces built to observe, collect, and represent it—and how those spaces participated in the larger reconfiguration of imperial relationships between Spain and Mexico at the end of the eighteenth century.

Using archival correspondence and visual sources, this dissertation shows the limits of imperial control, emphasizing the rupture, disjunction, and failure of these building projects in the face of both environmental and political factors. Water seeped in to where it did not belong, as newly-arrived plants shriveled under the hot Mexican sun, or drowned in swampy soil. Buildings sank, showing the ineffectiveness of European rational modernity in the face of powerful environmental conditions. A history of the end of things, these years immediately preceded the insurgencies and revolutions that would come to sever New Spain’s, later Mexico’s, ties with Spain.

In this sense, the environmental and institutional tensions traced here formed part of the broader unraveling of imperial authority at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As Enlightenment rationality and Bourbon statesmanship met the Mexican soil, they landed on shaky—and rebellious—earth.