Panel organized for the 2026 Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Mexico City.
Kimberly Cassibry (Wellesley College) and Elizabeth R. Macaulay (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Mexico City’s Monument to the Revolution counts among the many classicizing monuments built in the Americas since 1492. While these freestanding arches, columns, and obelisks initially served to advance political projects such as imperialism, communities have continued to reinterpret, reshape and repurpose them. Past studies have addressed these monuments individually, often in comparison to European precedents.
Forging an intersection between critical monument studies and classical reception studies, this panel brings the classicizing monuments of South, Central, and North America into dialogue with each other for the first time. We aim to sharpen awareness of the role monuments played in the broader phenomenon of classical reception in the Americas. We also seek to understand the role of the Americas in creatively reimagining the classical designs of monuments that have become global in their popularity.
We welcome case studies that consider any facet of triumphal arches and other classicizing monuments in the Americas: their role in settler colonialism; their negotiation of global, regional, and local art and architectural traditions; the social and political contexts of their patronage, dedication, and commemoration; the significance of settings and recurrence in urban design; reception of individual structures over time, including destruction, neglect, and adaptive reuse; and current usefulness for wayfinding and anchoring community gatherings such as protests and farmers’ markets. Ephemeral monuments designed for special events and world’s fairs are also core to this discussion. While assembling case studies from different regions, we also aim to build an international cohort of specialists who are in conversation with each other.
