Mayan Revival

Mayan Revival buildings of the 1920s and 1930s borrow forms from Maya and other Mesoamerican architecture. Walls often slope inward as they rise (a batter), rooflines step upward in levels, and openings use corbel arches, made of stacked stones that each project past the one below. Surfaces carry geometric relief panels that imitate Maya glyphs. Builders used reinforced concrete, concrete blocks and tile to make them.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House (Los Angeles, 1919-1921) has walls that slope inward at the top, and his Ennis House (Los Angeles, 1924-1925) is built of patterned concrete blocks. Robert Stacy-Judd's Aztec Hotel in Monrovia, California (1924-1925) combines Maya motifs with Art Deco and Spanish Colonial Revival elements. The Guardian Building in Detroit (1928-1929) applies geometric patterns in brick, tile and limestone to a skyscraper. Art Deco also uses geometric ornament, but its zigzags and sunbursts are not copied from Mesoamerican buildings. Mayan Revival uses sloping walls, corbel arches and glyph-like panels.

Mayan Revival began in the United States in the late 1910s and 1920s, when architects started using Maya and other Mesoamerican forms for new buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House in Los Angeles (1919-1921) is described as one of the first Mayan Revival structures. For the Ennis House (1924-1925) he drew on Puuc architecture at Uxmal in Yucatan and sought an architecture indigenous to America. Robert Stacy-Judd (1884-1975), an English architect working in California, designed the Aztec Hotel in Monrovia (1924-1925) and wrote Maya Architecture and the Creation of a New Style. His source images included Frederick Catherwood's illustrations in John Lloyd Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan.

The style spread through the late 1920s and 1930s and often combined with Art Deco. The Mayan Theater in Los Angeles opened in 1927, followed by the Fisher Building in Detroit (1928), the Guardian Building in Detroit (1928-1929) and the Mayan Theater in Denver (1930). Stacy-Judd's Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles and the Berkeley Public Library both date from 1934. In 2019 Hollyhock House became the first World Heritage Site in Los Angeles, as part of Wright's 20th-century works.