Guatemala City has a mine of modernist buildings like no other city I have visited. Exploring these architectural gems is an exhilarating experience, where dramatic political shifts and the cultural aspirations of a nation are traceable in the details.
In the 20th century, architects from Guatemala were educated in Europe and the US, importing the international style of modernism for their civic buildings. However, the mid-century architecture of the city radically transformed as Guatemala underwent political upheaval with a revolution in 1944, followed by a US-backed coup and brutal civil war. Architects became bolder, searching for an emblematic style of building, and in the 60s and 70s, a tropical modernist cocktail emerged that referenced the natural riches of Guatemala, its local crafts, traditional cultures and Mayan heritage. Here are six such buildings.
The Teatro Nacional
The Teatro Nacional is quite simply mind-blowing. This extraordinary complex of expressionistic buildings, completed in 1978, is regarded as one of the finest examples of modern architecture in Latin America. It was designed by local maverick Efrain Recinos who was not an architect, but an artist – and an engineer by training. Known as the Guatemalan Picasso, Recinos was also a painter, sculptor, muralist and connoisseur of film, music and literature. He reputedly slept on the building site during its prolonged construction, living, dreaming and breathing its realisation.
This performative assemblage of mosaic-clad concrete planes that swoop and scoop, tilt and turn is dazzlingly playful – an interweaving of unlikely forms that combine in joyful anarchic celebration. The resultant spaces are imbued with a surreal sense of animation of the inanimate – a roof suddenly becomes a floor that folds into a cantilevered ramp, embraced by walls that appear to float, and terraces that teeter exuberantly as if the building itself is salsa dancing with the sky.
C. 24 3-81, Cdad. de Guatemala 01001, Guatemala; culturaguate.com
Picture credit: Leonardo Finotti
The Rectory at the University of San Carlos
It’s worth exploring this university campus, as you will come across many cool modernist gems including this one, the Rectoria. This is a relatively small but imposingly beautiful building and the focal point for administration and events at the university. It squats strangely like a praying mantis on facetted columns that elevate it from the ground plane.
The design uses local tropical wood with white Morlon stone to form finned columns that continue up the southern facade in a diamond-shaped motif. These large, chamfered stone panels act like stone curtains tied and draped against the glass to block the entrance of direct sunlight into the university council chambers housed within the building.
11 Avenida, Cdad. de Guatemala, Guatemala; usac.edu.gt
Picture credit: André Asturias
National Library and General Archive of Central America
Built on the site of the former Royal Palace, this large public library and archive was designed by Rafael Pérez De León during the revolution years and finally opened in 1958. The severe, thick-set slab of a building with its heavy rationalist forms and lines was later transformed in 1967 by the addition of an intricately detailed white concrete podium at its entrance. In direct contrast with the sober host-building, the fine bas-relief surface of these entrance walls is encrusted with animistic forms of distinctly Guatemalan life expressed with a modern baroque vivacity.
Irresistible to the touch, its surface writhes with figurative fragments including fish, eyes, wings, locks of hair, a breast, lips, brought to life by Efraín Recinos. Like other creatives and intellectuals at that time, Recinos chose to express his discomfort and anger towards the political regime through his art, evident in this vast mural. Though ultimately censored in various places the mural of the national library can be read as a powerful social and political commentary.
5a Avenida 7-26, Cdad. de Guatemala, Guatemala
Picture credit: Hugo Quinto
Banco de Guatemala
This majestic concrete edifice on the horizon was commissioned by the Bank of Guatemala, and opened in 1966. At 40 metres high, it rises from the zone known as the Civic Centre of Guatemala City – a district recently designated as a National Cultural Heritage area. In contrast with the heavy brutalist utilitarian design of the building, the east and west façades are adorned with Mayan figures, created by local artists Dagoberto Vásquez Castañeda and Roberto González Goyri.
These friezes appear like vast billboards on the horizon; 20th-century versions of the elaborate carvings adorning the Baroque Spanish Colonial churches around Guatemala. The traditional Catholic symbols in the architecture of these churches were intriguingly subverted by 17th-century Mayan stonemasons (themselves sun and moon worshippers) with more local symbols of serpents and maize and coffee appearing on the church facades. Castaneda and Goyri’s friezes at the bank are a mid-century equivalent of this cultural expression.
7a Avenida 22-01, Ciudad de Guatemala, 01001, Guatemala; banguat.gob.gt
Picture credit: Leonardo Finotti
Templo El Santuario del Corazón de Jesús
This wonderfully curvaceous chapel, designed by Benjamín Cañas with Pelayo Llarena in 1963, stands in sharp contrast with the city’s typically rectilinear modernist buildings. The plan of the building is derived from the Christian fish symbol, and the walls arc around a bell tower that embraces a colossus figure of Christ. A series of bas-relief geometric panels formed in black volcanic obsidian adorn the base and also the top parapet – like a crown. Be sure to go inside; the monastic stillness of the vast space within is extraordinary.
26 Calle 2-46 Ciudad de Guatemala 01001, Guatemala
Picture credit: André Asturias
The Telgua Building
This fondly regarded modernist architectural landmark was built in 1964 as the headquarters of the state-run telecoms firm now known as Guatel. The cheese-grater like form of the main section of the building with its lattice of concrete fins angled against the fierce rays of the sunshine was highly innovative at the time, though its effectiveness against solar gain is clearly insufficient.
Today, the original clean-lined façade is overrun with air-condenser units housed inside the coffers (testament to its flawed design), as if to retrospectively mock the modernist aversion to ornamentation. The entrance, perched on stilts, is shaded with a parabolic concrete shell that undulates along the undercroft of the first floor. This same motif is repeated along the front parapet of the building like a frilly parasol waving along its rooftop.
7a Avenida 12-39, Cdad. de Guatemala 01001, Guatemala
Picture credit: Leonardo Finotti
Alongside running her award-winning architectural practice, Sally Mackereth designs jewellery, furniture, theatre sets and exhibitions. She recently completed a PhD that reflects on her creative practice at the intersection of architecture and ‘magicking’; @studiomackereth and studiomackereth.com
