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  3. Architectural morphology is the study of how shifting cultural and environmental conditions produce changes in an architectural

Architectural morphology is the study of how shifting cultural and environmental conditions produce changes in an architectural

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问题     Architectural morphology is the study of how shifting cultural and environmental conditions produce changes in an architectural form. When applied to the mission churches of New Mexico exemplifying seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish colonial architecture in what is now the southwestern United States, architectural morphology reveals much about how Native American culture transformed the traditional European church architecture of the Spanish missionaries who hoped to convert Native Americans to Christianity.
    Many studies of these mission churches have carefully documented the history and design of their unique architectural form, most attribute the churches’ radical departure from their sixteenth-century European predecessors to local climate and a less-mechanized building technology. The limitations imposed by manual labor and the locally available materials of mud-brick and timber necessitated a divergence from the original European church model. However, the emergence of a church form suited to life in the Southwest was rooted in something more fundamental than material and technique. The new architecture resulted from cultural forces in both the Spanish colonial and indigenous Native American societies, each with competing ideas about form and space and different ways of conveying these ideas symbolically.
    For example, the mission churches share certain spatial qualities with the indigenous kiva, a round, partly subterranean room used by many Southwest Native American communities for important rituals. Like the kiva it was intended to replace, the typical mission church had thick walls of adobe (sun-dried earth and straw), a beaten-earth floor, and one or two small windows. In deference to European custom, the ceilings of these churches were higher than those of the traditional kiva. However, with the limited lighting afforded by their few small windows, these churches still suggest the kiva’s characteristically low, boxlike, earth-hugging interior. Thus, although pragmatic factors of construction may have contributed to the shape of the mission churches, as earlier studies suggest, the provision of a sacred space consistent with indigenous traditions may also have been an important consideration in their design.
    The continued viability of the kiva itself in Spanish mission settlements has also been underestimated by historians. Freestanding kivas discovered in the ruins of European-style missionary communities have been explained by some historians as examples of “superposition”， Under this theory, Christian domination over indigenous faiths is dramatized by surrounding the kiva with Christian buildings. However, as James Ivey points out, such superposition was unlikely, since historical records indicate that most Spanish missionaries, arriving in the Southwest with little or no military support, wisely adopted a somewhat conciliatory attitude toward the use of the kiva at least initially. This fact, and the careful, solitary placement of the kiva in the center of the mission-complex courtyards, suggests an intention to highlight the importance of the kiva rather than to diminish it.
Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the argument about the Spanish missionaries’ attitude toward the kiva?
选项 A、The period of most intensive settlement by Spanish missionaries in the Southwest occurred before the period in which the mission churches of New Mexico were built.
B、There are no traces of kivas in Spanish mission settlements that were protected by a large military presence.
C、Little of the secular Spanish colonial architecture of the Southwest of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is predominantly European in style.
D、Some Spanish missionary communities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were attached to Spanish military installations
E、New Mexico contains by far the largest concentration of Spanish mission-style church architecture in the United States
答案D
解析 本题属于加强题。根据第四段，西班牙传教士对土教堂的真正态度应该是接纳性态度，因此本题需要找加强“接纳性态度”的选项。很多考生看到选项D会觉得这是削弱，因为有军事支持就证明西班牙人想要铲除土教堂。但是要注意，在做逻辑题时，原文中的事实是不应该被改变的。根据第四段。有如下事实：一些西班牙传教士到达美洲的时候没有军队，以及土教堂独立地存在于欧洲建筑群正中间，因此选项D的正确理解方式是：就算有了军队，土教堂依然没有被铲除，这加强了西班牙人想要膜拜土教堂的可能性。
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