Browsing by Subject "Spanish colonial missions"
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Item Holding loss at its center : age value at Missions Concepción & San José(2019-05) King, Meghan Elizabeth; Holleran , Michael; Ibarra Sevilla, BenjamínMission Concepción and Mission San José in San Antonio, Texas belong to a collection of five eighteenth century Spanish Colonial Missions founded along the San Antonio River. The churches of Concepción and San José are of analogous construction, built of local tufa limestone with corresponding layers of lime stucco. The history of these buildings has seen several eras of preservation approaches, or lack thereof, up to and including abandonment. This thesis considers the state of the exterior stucco of both buildings as a means by which to contemplate the value preservation places on loss and look of age. In honoring all periods to the building of a monument, the preservation of the churches' picturesque and semi-ruinous appearances emerges at odds with the material needs of the buildings and presents a limited framework of interpretation. This analysis investigates the "why" of this preservation scenario why does loss prefigure so centrally in preservation? And from where does this value emerge? In investigating the ideological framework of the Venice Charter and the Secretary of the Interior's Standards, an inherently broken notion of time reveals itself at their roots. In practice this produces a binaristic notion of loss and wholeness that are an inherent expression of age value's priority above all else. In applying this analysis against the Missions, this thesis seeks to redress the limits of this framework and locates a space for an alternative preservation discourse of capacious interpretations.Item The San Juan and Espada acequias : two historic cultural landscapes preserved, restored and adapted as contemporary urban agriculture(2018-07-11) Alvarado, Daniel Joseph; Lierberknecht, Katherine E.This report assesses the historic, current and future conditions two Spanish Colonial irrigation systems in San Antonio, Texas known as the San Juan and Espada acequias, respectively. The two acequias are the only functional remnants of what was once a city-wide system which supported thousands of early San Antonians. Today, the two acequias are managed separately, each in a way that reflects their complicated history and institutional structure. This report relates in detail those histories and parses out the complex institutional structures in the context of the rapid urban growth of San Antonio and wider challenges such as climate change and groundwater depletion. It demonstrates that the acequias democratic, derecho-based water and land allocation structure is a valuable institutional model for resilient resource management regimes, however their continued existence will require significant adaptation to contemporary legal, political and ecological realities. With this in mind, this report seeks to identify theoretical frameworks with which the acequias could be restored and adapted for these contemporary realities as urban agriculture system while maintaining aspects of their traditional water and land allocation structures. It identifies the acequias as social-ecological systems (SES) that could be incorporated into a broader ecosystem services valuation of the San Antonio River watershed. It argues that the National Park Service (NPS), a major stakeholder in the acequias, should adapt its definition of Cultural Landscapes to better support working lands within their purview. Finally, it identifies the development status of the 1,750 acres of land (broken down by parcels) potentially irrigatable by the acequias and quantifies the potential yield of those parcels as supporting 38,356 people’s recommended vegetable consumption per year.