Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social, San Jose, Costa Rica. Architect: Alberto Linner.
Stela A, Great Plaza, Copán ruins, Honduras. A depiction of 18 Rabbit, the thirteenth Mayan king of Copán, who ruled for over forty years, starting in the late six hundreds, and who was the architect of Copán’s most elaborate structures.
Ministry of the Environment, energy-and-telecommunications building, San Jose, Costa Rica.
Chitchen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico. Possibly the most famous Mayan landmark, the Kukulkan pyramid, in Chichen Itza, was used to read the stars. On the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the shadows cast by the stairways resemble a giant snake.
Interior of the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Managua, Nicaragua. Architect: Ricardo Legorreta.
Uxmal ruins, Yucatan, Mexico.
Bank of Guatemala building complex, Guatemala City. Mural artist: Roberto González Goyri.
Replica Stela with Mayan hieroglyphics, Iximché ruins, Guatemala.
Copán ruins, Honduras
Centro Cultural Miguel Ángel Asturias, Guatemala City. Architect: Eran Recinos. Recinos’s idea was for the building to emulate a reclining jaguar.
Contraloria General de la Republica, San Jose Costa Rica. Architect: Raúl Goddard.
Temple I, Tikal, Guatemala.
Central Library, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. Architect, Juan O’Gorman.
Rosalila Temple Replica, Copán ruins, Honduras. This replica is a one-to-one scale model of the original temple, buried inside the ruins of Copán. Because of its burial, the coloring and detail of the original was perfectly preserved.
Viewing platform, Volcán Irazú, Costa Rica.
Iximché ruins, Guatemala. At Iximché, our guide’s first language was not Spanish but the Mayan dialect Kaqchikel, which was spoken by the Mayans who ruled here.
National Library of Mexico, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. Architect: Orso Nuñez.
A Mayan corbel arch, Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico.
The Luis Barragán House, Mexico City. The Casa Luis Barragán is a temple to the architect’s philosophy of architectural simplicity and harmony with nature. In his later career he abandoned architecture altogether, to pursue garden design.
Nunnery, Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico. Conquistadors who first explored the ruins at Chichen Itza thought this complex reminiscent of nunneries in Europe.
Today, we’ll check in with Magda Biernat and Ian Webster, as they continue their journey from Antarctica to Alaska, which they began in January of this year. “Beginning in San Jose, Costa Rica, we were pleased to see a rise in the number of Brutalist buildings,” Ian told me.
This architectural style was developed after a world weary of war dropped the pretenses of beauty from the façades of government buildings and went all in on a new kind of populist expression of power. In Central America, as elsewhere, the new style dovetailed neatly with a fledgling socialist movement and an explosion of low-cost postwar growth. Today, Brutalism has more critics than admirers, but there is something to be said for its play of repetitive shapes, offset angles, and soaring geometrics. Granted, this is probably not what most tourists are searching for when they visit Central America, but since Magda is an architectural photographer and we are both fans of these bold, clean architectural declarations, we went out of our way to find them.
When we visited the ruins of the Mayan city-states for the first time, we were struck by the similarities—some intentional, some not—between Mesoamerican architecture and their comparably recent Brutalist counterparts. The Mayan temples were originally as ornate as any neoclassical edifice in Europe, but they’ve since been stripped down to their essential form by wars, looting, and the passage of time. As they’ve atrophied, they’ve achieved the goal of the Brutalists: a purity of form and an unadorned statement of grandeur.
Above is a selection of Magda’s photographs of Brutalist buildings contrasted with Mayan ruins, accompanied by Ian’s captions. You can see previous Photo Booth posts from their journey, and detailed record of the trip on their blog.
