Yurrita Church
Felipe Yurrita · Guatemala City, Guatemala · 1941
Yurrita Church is an intensely individual historicist composition commissioned and designed by Felipe Yurrita. Its compact mass combines Gothic, Romanesque, Baroque and fantastical elements into a deliberately picturesque object unlike the more academic civic architecture of contemporary Guatemala City. Towers, carved stone surfaces and irregular volumes make the church read almost as an architectural collage. The building is valuable less as a pure stylistic example than as a highly personal work demonstrating the eclectic possibilities of early twentieth-century Guatemalan religious architecture.