One modernism? One history? One world?

One
Guedes?

by Simon Sadler

10 January 2011

Forty-six years after the Architectural Review noted that Mozambiques Pancho Guedes had received
no attention by the outside world, [1] little has changed, and yet Guedes work maps back onto a
larger history of modern architecture in at least three obvious and interrelated ways. The first is as a
reminder of an expressionist, organicist tendency that re-emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as modernisms
road less travelled. A second way is as part of a move toward the programmatic revision of modernism
hatched around Team 10s discussions of the 1950s-70s. A third way is in relation to the question of what
postcolonial modernism was thought to constitute, as modernism developed outside of its European and
North American base. This essay will consider Guedes place on this map of post-war modernism, but it
must also allow that Guedes is in some ways off that map, and that the map may be a fiction: is there one
modernism to map, with one history, for one world? Is there, for that matter, one Guedes?

Let us return to 1961, the year the Architectural Review told its readers about Guedes, and three years
after Guedes completed what can serve here as his signature building, the so-called Smiling Lion
apartment block of 1956-1958 in Loureno Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique. With this building,
Guedes took advantage as the buildings developer to give full rein to a personal style he would call the
Stiloguedes, the Guedes Style [2]. The building was childlike in its exuberance, part-inspired by a
drawing given to the architect by his six-year-old son [3], drooping balconies with slightly elliptical sides
seeming to rock within the blocks amorphous, sculpted sides, crowned with boldly patterned parapets and
thin-shell vaults, the ensemble finished with paintings and martial sculptural motifs. It is also in 1961 that
the leading historian and critic Nikolaus Pevsner renews his campaign against this sort of neo-Art
Nouveau stemming from Antonio Gaud [4]. For Pevsner, design was a moral commitment confirmed in
the revolutionary puritanism of the Bauhaus.

At stake was modernisms unitary map and character. As one reviewer of Pevsners writing noted at the
time, in the work of Guedes, and more prominently that of Eero Saarinen, Pevsner perceived a near and
present danger to the International Style [5]. Moreover there was something peculiarly unstable in the
work of Guedes, even compared to Saarinena desire to express not so much some outward experience
(such as the sensation of flight famously depicted by Saarinens 1956-62 TWA air terminal at Idlewild), but
rather an outsider condition, like that pursued in art autre in France and by the unruly architecture of
Bruce Goff in Oklahoma. Guedes work also hailed some inward state similar to that which was then
coalescing around situationism. Architecture is not apprehended as intellectual experience but as
sensationan emotion, Guedes announced in his dissertation. Buildings must become presencesbe
like vast apocalyptic monsters or gently floating albatrosses so invented as to be remembered forever
like the temples of India and the pyramids of Egypt I have asked nature to invade architecture
exuberantly as if it were a ruin. [6]

Guedes was recognized as part of a dissident movement in architecture, often likened to the Angry Young
Men of 1950s literature [7], invigorated by the gradual rediscovery of the pioneering early-twentieth-
century art nouveau, expressionist, futurist and surrealist avant-gardes [8]. In his colourful graphics and
bulbous, cosseting spaces there was a striking family resemblance between Guedes and the new avant-
gardes of the 1960s like Archigram, all of which were attracting Pevsners consternation [9]. Pevsner,
though, was increasingly countered by a new generation of critic-historians, such as his student Reyner
Banham, who entertained Guedes in the hallowed pub of the Architectural Reviews office
basement [10].
Like Banham, Guedes was also maintaining conversations with Team 10, led by more sober figures such
as Alison and Peter Smithsonso-called Brutalist architects for whom the ultra-experimental, dadaist-
surrealist-expressionist tendency epitomized by Archigram appeared as a troublesome offspring [11].
Some of Guedes designs, like that for the Nurses Training College at Loureno Marques (1964-65), bore
a distinct Brutalist impress. Guedes attended Team 10 meetings from 1962 to 1976, and in lieu of a final
Team 10 meeting planned for Portugal in 1981 the Smithsons visited Guedes in Lisbon [12]. If Archigram-
style architects cultivated renegade roles, Team 10 architects aspired to a direct succession from the first
central organizing body of modern architecture, CIAM, styling itself as a family and discussion group
rather than an avant-garde. Team 10 aimed to save the modern movement from its seemingly imminent
fragmentation by talking through practitioners common concerns within post-war architectures expanded
field. Broadly, Team 10 was troubled that a single, Hegelian convergence of design into a universal
modern movement paid inadequate attention to the ways in which architecture was having to address
regionalism, anthropology, urban and economic growth. For Guedes, these concerns were as compelling
as his need to vent empathies with the avant-garde.

Guedes apparently managed these multiple interests through his manifold personae. The adoption of
multiple identities was not simply a surrealist or dadaist (let alone postmodern) strategy; some journalists
at the Architectural Review used nom des plumes or wrote in different registers for different
circumstanceseven the level-headed Pevsner delegated his research into nineteenth-century vernacular
architecture to the fictive Peter F. R. Donner [13]. Guedes clarified his various monikers: Amncio
Guedes is the spirit of Pancho Guedes, first revealed internationally in the pages of the Architectural
Review. It was discovered by Banham who descended with him to the bar basement at Queen Annes
Gate in 1960. Pancho Guedes, in turn, is the father, the inventor of all the art works, while A.
dAlpoim Guedes is the son. [14] Guedes created this trinity to conceive, execute, and archive a body of
work that had emerged out of multipart influences, concerns, movements and geographies. Similarly Le
Corbusier, the invented identity of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, discovered an underlying feminine psyche
within himself in the 1930s, and eventually allowed himself an untrammelled range of architectural modes
by turns archaic, vaulted, monumental, and rawhere were the styles that could be discerned in the
Guedes portfolio too, and which caused Pevsner so much anxiety, and which signalled to Team 10 that
modernism was no longer a single methodology.

Aeroplane House, Loureno Marques, (Maputo), Mozambique 1951

Arguably, though, Guedes stylistic dilemma was more complex than that faced either by Archigram or by
other members of Team 10, working as he did as an migr Portuguese in Mozambique. Granted, there
were precedents for architecture at once modern yet responsive to climates, cultures and vernaculars not
of Western origin. Le Corbusiers projects in 1950s India were joined by Louis Kahns Dhaka in the 1960s.
Balkrishna Doshi, reciprocally, was an Indian participant in Team 10 synthesizing the Corbusian idiom with
local building traditions. Team 10s Aldo van Eyck insisted that modern architecture had things to learn
from the North African settlement patterns of the Dogon, much as Guedes drew upon the forms (such as
curved walls) found in the stone ruins of the Great Zimbabwe and the African kraals [15]. But perhaps the
situation most closely approximating that of Guedes was that of Brazilian colleagues. Brazil and
Mozambiqueone a former colony, the other moving towards independenceretained a heavy
Portuguese influence while endeavouring to modernize. Guedes, like a youthful Oscar Niemeyer [16],
projected cubist, syncopated conversions of local motifs and patterns. But there was a telling distinction
between Guedes in Mozambique and postcolonial identity-building happening elsewhere. Guedes was
without the commissionsand encumbrancesof central and state patronage, and primarily accepted
private, middle-class house designs as his laboratory. Other than these, in Mozambique, I worked mostly
for missionaries and banks and big foreign companies, Guedes admits. Describing it as though it were
the Foucauldian colonial heterotopia [17], Guedes continues: Loureno Marques was a fiction. It wasnt
Portuguese. Loureno Marques was always the Transvaal port for imports and exports and it was the
people, the foreigners involved in the ports that I worked for. [18]

Samora Machel the President of Mozambique eating the family home in Loureno Marques. The
property was seized by the government when Pancho left Mozambique in 1975

So the opportunity to monumentalize the democratic, modernizing institutions of the so-called developing
world (like parliaments and universities) largely eluded Guedes, even as they were being seized upon by
Le Corbusier, Kahn, and the Latin American architects that Guedes admired, like Niemeyer and Juan
OGorman. While explicitly grounding him in nationhood, Guedes 1985 self-analysis Vitruvius
Moambicanus was neither an architectural rule book nor the synthesis of a national spirit [19]. Guedes
outlook was international, inventive, and individualist, making him a witness to several cultures rather than
a member of any one. He moved between Ancient and Modern, Dada and Team 10, from the medieval
streetscape to the street plans of Ildefons Cerd, from Gaud to Le Corbusier, from Italy to Portugal to
southern Africa. The multiple styles asynchronously presented by the Vitruvius Moambicanus challenge
location within any particular time, space, teleology, or even authorship. Curiously, this made Guedes
Mozambiquean architecture ambivalent toward colonial [20] and local ancestry alike, and he discussed his
European ancestry as though a visitor to it, inquisitive about the Renaissance, fascinated by Barcelona,
brooding about his Portuguese homeland. In Mozambique, he designed and built some five-hundred
buildings, enough, as he puts it, to constitute a small city, before conceding in 1975 the impossibility of
riding out the political disturbances there, and slipping across the border to South Africa. There, he worked
at the University of the Witwatersrand within the confines of the apartheid system while looking forward to
South Africas liberation.
To draw on the 1960s postcolonial theory of Frantz Fanon, Guedes portfolio had inklings of a postcolonial
national consciousness, holding the Eurocentric at bay, but at the cost of a hypostatizing exoticism, lauding
idiosyncrasy and little challenging the prevalence of the bourgeoisie, and so remaining tangential to
cultural collectivism (Guedes assembled around him a closely-directed atelier of black African
draughtsmen, craftsmen and artists) [21]. We might compare Guedes with Egypts Hassan Fathy, whose
career, if not exemplary, resisted the quasi-colonialism of modernism by rethinking the potential of
indigenous forms, plans, crafts and materials. For Guedes, however, indigenous architecture spoke to
racial and cultural inequity rather than synthesis: When buildings were needed but there was almost no
money, I always turned to the traditional way of building, to the Mozambican vernacular to make a
beginning Yet it was only as a last recourse that such proposals would be accepted. The blacks [sic]
always wanted a casa de brancoa white mans house, instead. They were ashamed of their own
wonderful, most suitable and economical grass houses. [22]

Clandestine Nursery School Bairro do Canio, Loureno Marques, 1968

Nonethelessand almost in spite Guedes rejection of any teleologywe can posit something modernistic
about his work: the defiance of hegemony, be it national, stylistic, or institutional. Here is the freedom
allowed to the bourgeois man at the periphery (the license afforded Guedes, working in an environment
relatively unencumbered by political intervention bar clients wishes and economics, was envied by
members of Team 10) [23]. In truth, only the better-known part of the prolific Guedes portfolio is in the
Stiloguedes, and superficially Guedes work in downtown Loureno Marques, while quirky, was not
necessarily easy to distinguish on first sight from that of the tropical (ne colonial) architecture being
exported from European metropolitan centres like London [24]. (The Octavio Lobo Building is a narrow
slice of offices, a building for hire, a carcass to be stuffed with business, Guedes commented with
disarmingly self-critical insight of a building he designed with the typical tropical architecture devices like
brises-soleil.) [25] Yet Guedes kept his distance from the metropolitan networks of tropical architecture,
and even from Team 10. He likewise preferred the southern edges of Europe to its hubs, places like
Gauds Catalonia, and post-war Portugal, where peasant culture remained as powerful as its modernizing
industrial nemesis. A little like his Portuguese contemporaries Fernando Tavora and lvaro Siza, in ethos if
less so in style, Guedes architecture played its part in international modernism precisely by offering
inflection to it. Guedes work of the 1950s-70s might qualify as an instance of critical regionalism, if of a
somewhat flamboyant and monumental stripe that might remind the viewer of that eras Austrian avant-
garde. His architecture countered the shallowness and hastiness often associated with modernization in
the developing world, especially in go-go economies like that of post-war Loureno Marques. Guedes was
professionally and emotionally invested in Africa in a way that distinguished him from European
intellectuals, like Rimbaud and Gauguin, who earlier tried to lose themselves in the colonial world.

Smiling lion apartments, Saipal Bakery, completed 1958

Guedes correspondingly represented an optimistic, one-world cultural unity (in the face of centralization
and deference), informed perhaps by the 1950s and 1960s rhetoric of the United Nations and pan-
Africanism. Transcending the incipient civil strife of Mozambique and South Africa, for instance, Guedes
charming paintings (which he regarded as inextricable from design) are quilted from a variety of skin
colours and reduce humanness neither to social type, nor individual expression, nor political affiliation,
instead directing our attention to the visionary, to movement, and to social interaction. An ideogrammatic
painting of his Smiling Lion apartment block [26] seemingly ameliorated, into an organic cross section, an
otherwise disconcerting racial and class stratification, with servants lodged in the attic (an arrangement
that had begun to disappear in Europe after the First World War). The painting typifies Guedes
preoccupation with an almost Bachelardian sense of dwelling, insisting that a unitary spirit of being is
common to all humans at all times and in all places, even if architecture itself is unable to rise to it, and
even as Guedes actual buildings were succumbing to neglect and war.

By both circumstance and choice, Guedes was an awkward fit for a singular history of a singular
modernism in a singular world. In his art he defiantly nurtured something of the natural man in his
completely wild and untamed state which, Hegel argued, excluded (black) Africans and their continent
from world history. [27] Pevsner and others wanted to consolidate modernisms narrative as one of
rational public service; Guedes, like other Team 10 participants, preferred to think about modern
architecture through sets of familial relations and resemblances. These contrary relations could
nevertheless be encompassed by modernism at its most reflexive. To visualize architecture as a more
expansive art, wrote Julian Beinart in 1961 of Guedes circle, social commitment includes for them also
a commitment to those aspirations, irrationalities and phantasies which are a large part of life and an even
larger part of art. [28] This outlook continues to inform the apparent delirium nestled in contemporary
architecture. Architecture today is also challenged, by globalization, to represent transnational culture in
ways somewhat familiar to the architects of the late colonial and postcolonial moment. Misguided or not,
coherent or not, architects sometimes grant themselves a certain distance from dictate and cooption.
Guedes wrung a cosmopolitanism from the pragmatic practice of commercial architecture, in the pragmatic
environment of postwar Loureno Marques.

[first published: Sadler, Simon. One modernism? One history, One world, One Guedes? in: Guedes,
Pedro (ed.) Pancho Guedes Vitruvius Mozambicanus, Lisboa: Museu Coleco Berardo, 2009, pp. 268-
275]

[1] Julian Beinart, Amancio Guedes, architect of Laureno Marques, Architectural Review, vol. 129,
pp. 240-251, p. 241, April 1961. For a concise bibliography for Guedes, see Timothy Ostler, Guedes,
Amancio, Grove Art Online (accessed 20 August 2007),
http://www.groveart.com/shared/views/article.html?section=art.035398.
[2] On Stiloguedes, see Vitruvius Moambicanus, Arquitectura Portuguesa, vol. 1, no. 2, 1985, pp.
1262, available at http://www.guedes.info/contfram.htm (accessed 30 August, 2007).
[3] Pedro Guedes also became an architect.
[4] See for instance Nikolaus Pevsner, Modern Architecture and the Historian, or, the Return of
Historicism, RIBA Journal, April 1961, pp. 230-240, and the revised edition of his respected survey An
Outline of European Architecture.
[5] Clifford Musgrave, Review: A new edition of Pevsners European Architecture, The Burlington
Magazine, vol. 103, no. 704., November 1961, pp. 469-470.
[6] Quoted in Pancho Guedes, Introduction, http://www.guedes.info/contfram.htm (accessed 30 August
2007).
[7] See for instance Beinart, op. cit.
[8] The rediscovery was affected, for example, through books like Ulrich Conrads and Hans Gunther
Sperlichs Phantastische Architektur, and Reyner Banhams Theory and Design in the First Machine
Age, both 1960.
[9] Indeed, Archigrams Dennis Crompton led the team that produced the Amancio Guedes catalogue
and exhibition at the Architectural Association in 1980, though for the most part the design and editing of
both were done by Pedro Guedes (correspondence with Dennis Crompton, August 2007). Guedes
maintained a long friendship with Archigrams Peter Cook, eventually attending his ArtNet Rallies in
London (telephone conversation with Pedro Guedes, November 2008).
[10] Guedes was also featured in Y aura-t-il une architecture?, LArchitecture dAujourdhui, vol. 33, no.
102, pp. 42-49, June-July 1962.
[11] Guedes came into contact with the Smithsons through the South African Theo Crosby, a mentor to
Archigram. See Team 10 website http://www.team10online.org/ (accessed 30 August 2007).
[12] They were joined by Jullian de la Fuente. See Team 10 website http://www.team10online.org/
(accessed 30 August 2007).
 [13] Gillian Darley, Moses of the Modern Movement, Architectural Review, December 2004,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3575/is_1294_216/ai_n8686683http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m
3575/is_1294_216/ai_n8686683/pg_1 (accessed 30 August 2007).
[14] Pancho Guedes, Introduction, http://www.guedes.info/contfram.htm (accessed 30 August 2007).
[15] These are cited as sources by Timothy Ostler. For the bearing of the Zimbabwe on African architects
in the 1960s, see Introduction in Udo Kulterman, New Directions in African Architecture, New York:
George Braziller, 1969.
[16] Guedes corresponded with Oscar Niemeyer (telephone conversation with Pedro Guedes, November
2008).
[17] See Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Diacritics no. 16, Spring 1986, pp. 22-27, based on a
lecture given in 1967.
[18] 30 Minutes With Pancho: Transcript of conversation with Karen Eicker, ArchitectAfrica.com,
http://architectafrica.com/bin0/news200311112_guedes_interview.html (accessed 30 August 2007).
[19] See Guedes, Vitruvius Moambicanus.
[20] See Guedes, A Neo Colonial Revival, in Vitruvius Moambicanus.
[21] See Beinart, op. cit.
[22] See Guedes, A Few Grass Houses, in Vitruvius Moambicanus.
[23] See Cedric Green, Amncio DAlpoim (Pancho) Guedes, Lisboscopio (catalogue of the Portuguese
representation at the 10th International Architecture Exhibition, 2006 Venice Biennale), available at
http://www.guedes.info/contfram.htm (accessed 30 August 2007).
[24] See Hannah le Roux, The networks of tropical architecture, The Journal of Architecture, vol. 8 no.
3, 2003, pp. 337-354.
[25] Guedes, Temporary Towers, Slabs and Slices of Street Face, in Vitruvius Moambicanus.
[26] See ex12, http://www.guedes.info/apcontfram.htm (accessed 30 August 2007).
[27] See G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 1837, trans. J. Jibree. New York: Colonial Press,
1899, p. 93, 99.
[28] Beinart, op. cit., p. 248.