CEGU

I met Maria Sanchez and Pedro Godoy in a nondescript classroom on the third floor of a University of Utrecht department building the summer after my junior year of college. It was built in the narrow Dutch way, with flights of curving wooden stairs and simple white trim. I sat in the back of the classroom, trying to ignore the wet denim on my ankles from the rainy bike ride over. Maria spoke fluidly at the front, gesturing along to the story of Cayalá as the classroom of mixed-age traditional architecture fanatics flicked their eyes between her, the pictures on the wall, and Pedro’s interjections. She wore a graceful white top that emerged in flashes from behind her hair when she moved her arms, Pedro leaned against a podium across from her watching everything from behind low-rimmed glasses. With incredible rhetorical cooperation the couple wove a three decade story involving characters I’d been studying for years. Born the same year I was, the fledgling development of Paseo Cayalá seemed to give life to the dreams we had all been nurturing that summer: visions of old architecture and new purposes, friendly streets filled with feet and bikes. Nine-thousand kilometers from Guatemala City and seven-thousand kilometers from Chicago, I felt myself pulled into the story of a newborn city.

I met Maria Sanchez and Pedro Godoy in a nondescript classroom on the third floor of a University of Utrecht department building the summer after my junior year of college. It was built in the narrow Dutch way, with flights of curving wooden stairs and simple white trim. I sat in the back of the classroom, trying to ignore the wet denim on my ankles from the rainy bike ride over. Maria spoke fluidly at the front, gesturing along to the story of Cayalá as the classroom of mixed-age traditional architecture fanatics flicked their eyes between her, the pictures on the wall, and Pedro’s interjections. She wore a graceful white top that emerged in flashes from behind her hair when she moved her arms, Pedro leaned against a podium across from her watching everything from behind low-rimmed glasses. With incredible rhetorical cooperation the couple wove a three decade story involving characters I’d been studying for years. Born the same year I was, the fledgling development of Paseo Cayalá seemed to give life to the dreams we had all been nurturing that summer: visions of old architecture and new purposes, friendly streets filled with feet and bikes. Nine-thousand kilometers from Guatemala City and seven-thousand kilometers from Chicago, I felt myself pulled into the story of a newborn city.

With five children and two nephews at home, Maria and Pedro confess that they find themselves thinking about legacy often.

The arches and colonnades of Cayalá evoke it as well, remembering not only the Spanish who brought the west to Guatemala and the Mayans who occupied it first, but the modern country that has been born from them both. “Cayalá is a statement about the two cultures that created Guatemala,” says Pedro solemnly, refraining from specifying what it may be stating exactly. Perhaps only time will tell. Present-day Guatemala is a complex mixture of Spanish and Mayan influence, mostly Catholic, very family-oriented and still tied to Mayan ceremonial rhythms. Cayalá has endeavored to represent all these aspects in its architectural language, from the delicately curved lampposts to the striking sun symbolism carved into doorways.

Sadly, I lack on the ground experience in Guatemala. A year ago I would have pictured lush, green mountains, turquoise sea, and all the grandmothers my friends seem to always be visiting.

I’ve seen pictures of cliffside cottages, rope swings hung over swimming holes, outside tables set with fruits and bread and stews. Images of Guatemala City’s gray expanses, freeways blurry with traffic, road signage marching up and over the hills.

When my sister lived there in the spring she would call me from the Antigua streets as she walked to class, and put me on FaceTime with her teacher while she glued beads onto her projects.

But this picture leaves out Cayalá, it led me to think that the dense city centers of Europe and Asia had no place on the verdant land of the Caribbean. Cayalá gives Guatemala City a healthy, bustling urban core and stands as an example of traditional design in the center of a hemisphere that is wracked with urban sprawl.

I asked Maria and Pedro about the challenges of adapting the historically European language to Central American land but they assured me that there were surprisingly few.

“We consulted the sacred book of the Mayans,” Maria tells me, “and Antigua is a direct precedent,” Pedro adds. The civic building is a good example of what they landed on, proudly standing atop a pyramid of Mayan steps; it presents an open façade of six classic columns supporting a clean white pediment. Intricate cobs of sacred maize are carved into the Corinthian capitals of each column. “Every building is a composition of traditional elements,” Maria says, “it’s the placement that gives continuity.”

Maria and Pedro’s time at Notre Dame’s School of Architecture drew them into a far-flung group of traditional architecture enthusiasts, bent on replacing self-indulgent modern developments with classically human-centered design and inspiring the next generation of designers to examine past precedents more carefully.

The burgeoning climate crisis, global urban housing shortage and the new internet-age have driven traditional architects to investigate how it may encourage the reuse of older buildings, reduce car usage, and increase density in new and old cities.

Naturally there is constant discussion as to what constitutes “traditional architecture;” what “traditions” it refers to and what a tradition even is, but it can be generally thought of as the building styles developed over long time periods by the indigenous occupants of a place. Even within western Europe, Dutch townhouse dimensions and window shutters differ markedly from even those of its bordering countries. Maria and Pedro’s experimentation in Guatemala shows that the adaptation and combination of traditional architectural languages can create new, healthy urban cores.

Paseo Cayalá has drawn criticism from the wider urban world for being built on privately owned land and for its real estate prices which on average run seventy times higher than the national average salary. I admit that my own immediate reaction to their presentation in Utrecht was skepticism at its inclusivity and use by those unable to afford a house, but Maria describes how Cayalá is routinely full of nonresidents and its infrastructure is specifically designed to accommodate and entertain daily crowds from outside.

A Bloomberg CityLab article calls it a “high-end gated community” which “promises discreet safety, order and a pleasant lifestyle” likely referring to the posted guards and security cabins which regulate the vehicular entrances to the development. Maria and Pedro acknowledge that the real estate prices are an unfortunate consequence of private landowners, however, they are adamant that the relationship they have with their clients has borne more fruit than thorns.

“We were fortunate to find a family with the same vision as us,” Maria delights, “they were also interested in building something for their children.”  This relationship has allowed Maria and Pedro to make decisions about the design of the development, like the pedestrian only zones and infrastructure budget, that might otherwise have been judged too experimental. Publicly funded developments in Guatemala have a bleak history of corruption, which Maria and Pedro were wary of when making initial decisions. The shared experiences between the two families made choices like the community funded church and the mixed-use buildings possible, choices that today make Cayalá a real home for its residents.

Though Paseo Cayalá was expensive to build, and now expensive to buy, the new extension is cutting costs by sticking to the template and will provide more affordable housing. Maria and Pedro, and their brethren in the traditional architecture-sphere, are conscious that new developments like Cayalá can easily become privileged enclaves, but hold that it’s often the easier battle to fight. Real change in an ancient urban core that has been the victim of decentralization and modernization for decades runs up against political, environmental, and demographic obstacles, while privately owned land can offer developers and designers freer reign over the landscape. While Cayalá doesn’t yet solve the equitable housing crisis, or the long term need for cars, it has become a beautiful, accessible downtown for Guatemala’s new generation. Which is what they set out to accomplish in 2002 with the legendary urban planner Léon Krier and a blank piece of paper.

Twenty-one years later, in a small room in Utrecht, I labored over the alley system in my plan for a new section of the city: MerwedeKanaalzone. I’d visited the site, a several kilometer long swath across the main canal from the city center, met the housing and commercial quotas for the project, and organized the parks and buildings in my plan. I saw the shapes of the original Cayalá plan on the inside of my eyelids when I blinked and I blunted the edge of an apartment complex concerned for the interiors of its corner units. Maria watched my pencil movements over one shoulder and Pedro nodded over the other. She placed a french-tipped fingernail on one intersection and pressed me to imagine it in 3D, to question whether it would provide the medieval, winding experience I intended or manifest as a scary dark corner instead. I widened a street at her bidding and imagined  the sunlight feeding an additional row of trees—it seemed like a step closer to Cayalá.