Read, see, do: Palenque's Palace, Mexico (c. AD 647--720) and the materiality of knowledge

This dissertation is about the history and philosophy of architecture at the Maya city of Palenque, Mexico during the 7th and 8th centuries. It considers how certain structurally-driven innovations in architectural design and construction at this polity expressed a novel architectural ambition. This development may be interpreted both comprehensively in the city's Palace and then subsequently through independent buildings beginning in the mid AD 600s that articulate a new philosophy of aesthetic practice and cultural aspiration. This project casts these developments against the wider net of Maya architectural history and tectonic practice and analyses ways in which Palenque subscribed to and departed from the existing architectural paradigm. It then places Palenque's experimental corpus of architecture in conversation with contemporaneous Maya practices that dominated the aesthetic landscape centering on language, sculpture, and painting. These keystones of ancient Maya cultural activity organized visual knowledge and constituted core modes of defining the epistemic map of elite Maya culture for at least half a millennium beginning in the AD 400s. I argue that developments in Palenque architecture took up these central protagonists of aesthetic domination and provide an alternate model for the definition and organization of knowledge. The architectural experiment and epistemic redefinition achieved by Palace architecture constitute the basis of my investigations. In addressing these issues I attempt to craft a new understanding of Maya architecture that intersects with preoccupations in the wider philosophy and history of architecture.