It doesn’t look quite real:
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It’s Cayalá, featured in Better! Cities & Towns:
I have to assure readers that the photo is real. … We reported in detail on phase 1 of this project in the March issue of BCT. The mixed-use buildings in phase 2 are designed by Estudio Urbano (Pedro Godoy and Maria Sanchez), the Guatemala-based Town Architects of Cayalá, with Richard Economakis of the University of Notre Dame, in collaboration with architect Leon Krier.
Clearly, it’s designed as an upscale town centre, and a quick check on Google Maps indicates it’s got plenty of auto-access:
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So why the comparison with Whistler?
Well, in addition to the instant-city quality, the new-urbanist design, the tradition-based architecture – all apparent on the surface – there’s the common elements of hidden underground parking and shared-space streets:
The town looks like it is built for the ages and the streetscape — designed so that all of the pavement is to be shared by vehicles and pedestrians — hides modern below-ground parking.
Cayalá: Krier at it again! Guatemala, the only country in Central America I had a machete stuck in my ribs. And I’ve been to them all several times. It figures!
This is another example of wet-face Krier taking advantage of a deluded, over indulged cohort who have lost faith in themselves, the society that engulfs them desperately resorting to fancy cake decorations they believe are representative of a lost and better past.
Guate, as the indigenes call it, is a hell-hole where life is cheap, girls are cheaper and the tourist get ripped off every time she steps on the street, especially as will happen in this cheese-cake stage set!
Authenticity? Indigenous respect? Self respect? Contemporary originality? Trashy bargain basement luxury!
You’ve come to the wrong century bub!
Give me a break, just because it is not industrial themed in glass and metal apparently it somehow cant be contemporary. BS. Nevermind the “I’m so cutting edge” modern architects all recreate the outdated 1920s modernist vision of mechanization, idealizing mans conquering of nature and an idolization of the machine/car/corporation. Krier’s vision of the human scale, localization, farmers markets, organic food, pedestrian, respect for the natural world is way more up-to-date than this retro Buck Rogers living-on-the-moon machine-will-solve-all-our-problems fantasy.
LOCO, PENDEJO
PS Just to get the history right I was a project manager with Gardiner Thornton Gathé Architects when they made their proposal for the first Whistler at the Gondola site: 1957+/-. I worked with Aspien on the models.
The whole purpose of Whistler was, and still is, its proximity to Whistler and Blackcomb mountains.
Much later the present town centre was developed on the old garbage dump and has grown incrementally. Whistler is ski resort diversifying to attract a year ’round clientele. If Michael Audaine gets his collection installed in a new art museum there all the better.
I have enjoyed ski-ing its slope for many years and wish it all the best.
Cayalá is a different trough: of foreign purpose on foreign soil. Obviously I have not visited but I wonder were it is and how to get there: indigenous land?
Krier has developed a technique of pulling on the heart strings of a consumer generation oblivious to all worldly needs except their own desperate wants. He may pirate an ancient typology but contemporary Guate has moved way beyond.
The promo blurb describes Cayalá as another vulgar tourist trap specifically focused on shop-till-ya-drop and ersatz luxury of mindless tourism: if the inmates thinq for a moment they have visited Guate they will be deluded.
Guate is a brutalized Banana Republic that has been under the thumb of US rapacious money for decades.
When indigenes get in the way of United Fruit, it just slaughters ’em: as has happened many times. Of course the baying ignoramuses swept away by Krier’s ugly musing will be oblivious to that. Krier is a Jack-o-lantern Willow-the-wisp leading eager students into a corporate architectural morass directed towards a blind consumer mob no longer able to afford what he is promoting.
Cayalá is nowhere close to resembling Whistler.