The style known as “Lombard Romanesque” entered the architectural lexicon during the late nineteenth century. Before American Arthur Kingsley Porter’s Lombard Architecture (1917) successfully translated it beyond the ocean, French, Austrian, German and Italian art historians and architects had found in the architecture of central-northern Italy a font of inspiration for architectural restoration and new production. While Fernand de Dartein was not the first to produce a lavishly illustrated study of these medieval buildings, his Étude sur l’architecture lombarde et sur les origines de l’architecture Romano-Byzantine (Paris 1865-82) was the most significant of its era, disseminating plans, facades and decorative motifs of 11^th– and 12^th-century Lombard Romanesque buildings. An Alsatian engineer and architectural historian avant la letter, de Dartein’s contribution to the creation of the historiographic myth of “Lombard Romanesque” was fundamental. It is often thought that Porter’s work underpins the renown of the style in the USA as exemplified by the facade of Royce Hall at the University of California in Los Angeles (Allison & Allison, 1929-32), but I suggest that this reconstruction of the narthex of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan is better understood as the American culmination of Dartein’s Italian studies.

Although “Neomedievalisms” and “Neo-Romanesque” have their own peculiar history in México’s architecture, their definitions have neither been debated nor contested in Mexican academic circles. In this first overview of the topic, we sketch out a history of the use of Neo-Romanesque architecture in México and of related definitions and debates. Mexican Neo-Romanesque architecture is characterized in particular by its eclecticism, blending forms adapted from Italy, Germany, and France with Gothic and Byzantine elements, and one of its protagonists was the Italian architect Adamo Boari (1863–1928). More importantly, we demonstrate what is at stake in recognizing how Neo-Romanesque architectural styles worked in Mexico, first under the regime of President Porfirio Díaz (1877–80, 1884–1911), a phase that largely ended with the Mexican Revolution that sent Díaz into exile, and then, surprisingly, in the middle of the 20^th century, and in Ciudad de México as well as in other locations throughout México. We hope this presentation will spur a larger conversation about neo-medieval architecture in México, its particularities and contexts, and its position in the wider discourse of global medievalisms.

During the 1920s, Los Angeles went on a building spree to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of migrants from across the United States, and the world, drawn to the City of Angels.  These new homes, shopping centers, houses of worship, universities, and cemeteries were built in a range of architectural styles, the discoordinate nature of which was evoked by Nathanael West in the opening pages of “The Day of the Locust” (1939).  Medieval featured prominently: Romanesque and Gothic, Byzantine and Islamic, and eclectic combinations or derivations thereof. Among these were the new campus for the University of California Los Angeles (YEAR), a paean to the so-called Lombard Romanesque; St. Monica’s Catholic Church (YEAR), which would sit comfortably in Modena or Como; and St John’s Episcopal Church (as of 2008, Cathedral), a tufa, steel and concrete reimagining of the late eleventh-century church of San Pietro in Tuscania (1925). Analysis of the design processes and related contemporary architectural and historical discourses sheds light on how such structures helped to construct Los Angeles as a modern city—but also as one that, ironically, privileged White and Protestant identities over indigenous, Hispanic, or Catholic ones.