Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán, Ciudad Oaxaca de Juaréz, Mexico
The 2020 winner of the Minnesota Architectural Foundation’s Ralph Rapson Traveling Study Award shares artwork from his travel journal
Artwork and text by Matthew Tierney, AIA | September 19, 2024
Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán, constructed between 1572 and 1724. The New Spanish Baroque landmark is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Original, digital hybrid artwork by Matthew Tierney, AIA, drawn in Procreate for iPad using watercolor, ink, pencil, and marker.
POSTCARD
The heat of the dry November day finally starts to subside. Kids, construction workers, and vendors talk and relax under the shade of the Guaje tree on the curb. The tree covers half of the road with long, frondy limbs as cars, old pickup trucks, and motorbikes putter along on the polished cobblestones.
People begin to emerge from the shelter of shade into the golden light on the plaza of the Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán. A few people stop to look up at the intricate carvings in the baroque church’s green Cantera stone. Street vendors laugh, and there is a warm hum and crackle as more oak is added to the fiery steel box beneath a well-used comal.
This everyday scene is, like countless others in Oaxaca, extraordinary. As I spent more time returning to the same locations, I began to understand the connections and flows that make this place so vibrant and complex.
The Ralph Rapson Traveling Study Award offers an opportunity to explore the world via structured travel with an architectural lens. I was interested in traveling to a place that I might have the chance to live instead of just visit. I spent two months in Oaxaca State traveling on foot and by bike, car, and public transit to explore and begin to understand the ethnobotanical connections that create biocultural products. I looked at corn, fiber, and stone as foci to try to unwrap some of these beautifully complex systems deeply embedded in the valleys and mountains.
Our Postcard department presents artworks by Minnesota artists and designers that capture indelible architectural scenes. Click here for more of Matthew Tierney’s artwork and reflections on his time in Oaxaca.
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