Heather Kintner | Graphic Designer » Blog Archive

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This winter has been one for the books: It’s mid-January and Chicago has already breezed past it’s “normal” amount of snow for the year, not to mention the couple of days of negative 30+ below. Today, it’s 16 degrees and feels like a heatwave — well, not really, but it doesn’t hurt as bad. The bottomline is, we could all use a reminder of warmer places right about now.

Martha Stewart seems to agree, and recently re-ran her show Martha in Mexico for those that missed it in November. The full episode is posted here in eight segments, with the option to play the entire show.

The episode features many Mexican highlights: Mayan ruins, several Yucatan towns, the Merida market, a fabulous hacienda, a cenote, and the gorgeous Dominican church in Uayma (shown in the segment titled “Valladolid”) — it’s a graphic designer’s dream building!

I was stunned by the pure graphicness of the decorations and adornments within this church: the rosettes, the colors, the patterning of it all! From the little research I have done, it seems that there is nothing else like it in Yucatan — It’s truly a one of a kind.

Originally built by the Dominicans, and ‘inspired’ by several Mayan symbols and structures, meaning is not lacking in each detail. As noted in the Martha segment, the flowers symbolize the peacefulness of heaven and the different colors represent faith, blood and progress. The church has since been taken over by the Franciscans, but they changed nothing about the architecture.

In 1847, it was used as a fortress in the Caste War of Yucatán and was nearly destroyed in an effort to rid the Yucatán of all evidence of Spanish rule. Luckily, in 2005, the complete restoration of the church was finished based on the original pattern as part of both a private program called Adopte una Obra de Arte (Adopt a Work of Art) and the government’s Institute of Anthropology and History.

To read a bit more on Uayma and for more photos of this amazing church, please visit Yucatan Living and Panoramio.

Adiós! Stay warm!!!

Top photograph by kdnz_Psycho, courtesy of Panoramio
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Photograph by fotokönig, courtesy of Panoramio