Laws of the Indies

From the Laws of the Indies (1573), it is easy to decipher the purpose of such an extensive set of conditions. After conquering many regions of the Americas, the Spanish wanted to establish how to go about founding new cities. They wanted to maintain control over these regions for their own use essentially. It's as if the Spanish were a very powerful and resourceful patron making people build based on the Spanish's rules. Very clever. The 148 ordinances also influenced how politics and social order were to be conducted.

Furthermore, as we discussed in last week's post on Granada and Santa Fe de Granada, the latter was built based on a grid-plan. Ultimately, the Spanish influenced this because they were the ones who conquered Granada in the first place so they re-built it based on their terms. An important aspect is the plaza area of the regions because the most important buildings according to the laws were to be built here. That made it so that people of less importance were pushed to the outskirts of the towns; and the Spanish liked it this way because it established a social hierarchy.

Additionally, The Law of the Indies states that for the sake of the beauty of a town, the buildings must be all of one type. This is just one example of how specific the laws can be, and yet like the earlier texts of Alberti's Ten Books on Architecture which is an area of study I have researched in the past, there are many flaws to this sort of outline because as much as it tells people what they should be doing, it does not give them guidelines about how they should do it.

References:

Laws of the Indies. Wikipedia.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_the_Indies