[Mozambique] Amancio Guedes

[Pedro Barradas]

Amancio d'Alpoim Miranda Guedes is an architect, a sculptor, a painter, and many other things. He is known familiarly to many people as Pancho Guedes. He was born in Portugal in 1925 and spent most of his very creative life in Mozambique, where he made more than 500 designs for buildings, most of them built there, but some built in Angola, in South Africa, and in Portugal. For this and other reasons he is less well known than he ought to be in the rest of the world. His exuberant, eclectic, complex and thoughtful buildings and projects have been published occasionally, but they were so far from the post-war US-led commercial multinational styles in architecture that they have not been sufficiently recognised for their quality and originality. His visual imagination absorbed every influence, from the art of Africa to the Surrealists, and synthesised them into a style which is recognisably his own, however varied the results appear at first glance. He was a post-modern 20 years before the term was invented, and he is still very active, working in Portugal now, inventing new buildings, painting and sculpting out a home on a steep hillside near Sintra in Portugal.

[Pedro Barradas]

Prédio Nauticus, Nampula. MOZAMBIQUE

[Pedro Barradas]

Building for Antonio Fernandes in Alto Mahé - MOZAMBIQUE

The Building for Antonio Fernandes in Alto Mahé frames each the two apartments on either side of the stairs and bears a large and walled roof terrace. A pebble mural faces the street. It is also the wall enclosing the garden of one of the ground apartments.

[Pedro Barradas]

For Otto Barbosa he built an office building with a garage and a showroom downstairs as a huge city portico. It is a long square mouth with angled sun breakers chewing into the space immediately in front.

[Pedro Barradas]

pic

[Pedro Barradas]

Was the headquarters and factory of the Lourenço Marques Baker's Co-operative They called themselves Saipal o pao da Cidade - The Bread of the City. The building was designed around the machinery layouts supplied by the German manufacturers of the ovens and other equipment. Unfortunately the machines did not know how to make Portuguese bread and refused to be adjusted to do so. The bakers fought amongst themselves and Saipal soon fell apart. In its early days Saipal had a powerful symbolic charge - the bakers loved it and explained often how marvellous it was that I had made their building in the shape of a huge Portuguese bread. All the bread cupboards in their various depots throughout the city had superimposed cutouts of the elevation in wood riding the top shelf. I had not been thinking of a Portuguese bread loaf. The section has been generated out of two parabolic arches worked on over and over again together with an engineer, so that the arches would only need very little reinforcement and theoretically none. The best part of Saipal is the lateral courtyard which resulted from the provision for future expansions of the factory area for Saipal to make biscuits when it was not making bread. The intersection of the arches and pillars resulting from a careful analysis of the loads became monumental personages seeming to step away from the rest of the building transfixed by a shaft of emptiness where neutral zone is. The recent Red Model of three bays of Saipal where the partial section turns into the full section exaggerates the idea of the building. It is a better and more perfect building than the temporary bakery and it is also an instant ruin. It is the son of Saipal built 25 years after the first Idea, and it makes it clear why I dismissed any sort of chronology long ago.

[Pedro Barradas]

pic 2

[Pedro Barradas]

pic

[Pedro Barradas]

The Leite Martins house on its narrow and very long site is a house of platforms around a narrow courtyard. The original sketches which Judge Leite Martins enthusiastically approved are more flamboyant and Gaudianesque than the drawings for the house as built. I still remember wandering through the completed house entirely empty, and filled with a great brightness from all the large areas of glass which were nevertheless sheltered from direct sunlight by the huge overhangs. Early photographs show the house when it was brand new with its huge light fittings made out of sheet iron. The house was soon invaded by vegetation which grew through holes in the roof provided for just that. Downstairs, at the back, two bedrooms shelter an enormous veranda below them which the Judge furnished like a room whose walls had vanished. It was much of a surrealist setting.


First plan

[Pedro Barradas]

Final plan

[Pedro Barradas]

Elevations

[Pedro Barradas]

House

[Pedro Barradas]

other view

[Pedro Barradas]

Crazy guy, and very funny as well, he use to teache in my university, I know him during a small conference at night... 1995, I think... :rolleyes:

[ryo]

Final plan
This Leite Martins House's plan is SUPERB!
I didn't know about him, he's very special!
Thanks for posting, Pedro

[primocordara]

interesting house! thanks!

[ryo]

http://www.guedes.info/sculpture/slides/15b.htm

[ryo]

http://www.guedes.info/drawings/

[Pedro Barradas]

Ryo, nice resource, what about this building seccion, almost "a la GAUDI" :D
The Prometheus building

[Pedro Barradas]

Prometheus seccion and elevation

[ryo]

Ryo, nice resource, what about this building seccion, almost "a la GAUDI" :D
The Prometheus building
It IS alla Gaudi, actually... ;)
maybe more naïve... :wondering

[Pedro Barradas]

maybe more naïve... :wondering

well he extrapolate architecture from is paintings and scupltures...
I think it´s not naíf, but a dreamer, with loads of imagination. Is architecture is performed thru art and vice versa...

[jparchitectus]

This Leite Martins House's plan is SUPERB!
I didn't know about him, he's very special!
Thanks for posting, Pedro


A fan of the pinwheel...?

Agreed nice plan :D

[Bastian]

I had Pancho as a teacher as well during my first year. Not only did he love his work, but he made everyone feel great as well, considering how hard and how different college was for those of us who had just came from highschool.

We used to hear him talk a lot of his work on Angola and Mozambique, but we only got to see a project (that I can't quite remember if he actually built or not) for a museum. I remember it was a square spiral...

Anyway thanks for sharing this... :)