Since its declaration of independence from Spain in 1821, Guatemala has suffered through a series of dictatorships, coups, civil wars and earthquakes. However, the nation of approximately 13 million has persevered by marketing and developing such staple crops as sugar cane, coffee and bananas, as well as through increased tourism.
The Portales Centro Commercial, located in the Gautemala’s capital, Guatemala City, represents a prime example of the nation’s growth and prosperity. The 330,000-sq.-ft., $45 million shopping center, which opened in October, has more than 170 stores, restaurants and a movie theater. The property owners, Immobiliaria Spectrum, hired Distec Graphics, a full-service, Guatemala City-based signshop, to fabricate the property’s main-ID tower sign and exterior wall façade. Distec also fabricated many interior tenant signs.
The skyscraping tower sign measures 122 ft. tall. Working within the steel support structure another supplied, Distec fabricated the tower sign with metallic faces that it shaped on its 6 x 8-ft. ShopBot CNC router and painted with Sur Color acrylic lacquer. The text comprises second-surface, flexible-face 3M™ Panagraphics™ (Alfredo Angel, Distec’s president, said acrylic, second-surface letters would’ve been too fragile for such a huge sign), and Permlight modules illuminate the sign. To create a 49-ft.-tall “totem” for the mall’s exterior, Distec inkjet-printed a series of panels using 3M’s Di-Noc™ carbon-fiber film to create the structural finishes.
Distec also fabricated numerous vendor signs, which were completed for Portales’ food-court tenants. Their fabrication entailed forming channel-letter returns manually with the shop’s in-house, manual bending equipment; CNC-routing the 1/8-in.-thick, acrylic faces; coating the faces with 3M Scotchcal 3630 translucent vinyl, and internally illuminating the signs with Permlight LED modules.
He said, “The mall provided a very short window to build and install the signs, so the project was a race against time. We transported the signs to the site as an assembly of 135 pieces, and walked with them the 300 yards from the parking lot to the roof.”
Angel continued, “The project’s magnitude was probably the largest we’ve ever encountered. As far as I know, the tower sign is the tallest in Central America. To execute the project, we had to deconstruct the original renderings into several smaller parts to make the construction process manageable.”