North via South: Mesoamerican Brutalism

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.