About this talk

Running time: 29 minutes

Guedes is a man of many faces, many names. He says that "Pancho" Guedes is the inventor of all the art and architecture; Amâncio Guedes is the spirit of "Pancho" Guedes. Amâncio d'Alpoim Guedes is the real Guedes, who was born Portuguese, educated in South Africa and lived and worked for twenty five years in Mozambique before being forced into exile. He was Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at the University of The Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

In Lourenco Marques, Guedes "invented and built enough buildings to make up a good-sized city". Everything he built was imaginative, economical, and had a strong presence.

Now he has become a teacher whose self-appointed task is "to explore the borders of architecture, to expand its territories, to illuminate the new lands and signpost them for his students and himself".

He says: "I believe that buildings grow out of each other, that each artist invents his own precursors, that there is an incessant dialogue with many pasts... I have worked in many styles simultaneously... I have classified my architectural inventions into a number of families and filed them... into a catalogue of twenty five architectures... my Vitruvius Mozambicanus". For his talk he has chosen thirteen of these architectures:

• "Stiloguedes"
• The "American-Egyptian Style"
• How Frank Lloyd Wright (see The World's Greatest Architect) used to help me in the beginning
• "Bargains In A Bush Style"
• A collection of disparate churches
• Grass houses
• Temporary towers, slabs, and slices of street face
• Buildings with walls twisting and turning this way and that
• My "arched and somewhat Roman manner"
• Parts of villages remembering other villages, far away in my mother country
• "Euclidian Palaces"
• The passages, steps, places, squares and monuments of the imaginary city
• "Learning machines" of all sizes

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