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Amâncio d'Alpoim Miranda " Pancho" Guedes (Lisbon, Portugal, 13 May 1925 – Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, 7 November 2015) was a Portuguese architect, sculptor, painter, and educator.
He is described as one of the earliest post-modernist architects in Africa and an archetype Eclectic Modernist.
Guedes spent much of his life in Portuguese Mozambique from the age of 7 years old and he would stay there for most of his life.
Wanting to become an artist, he enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1945. He soon decided to study architecture which was to him the culmination and combination of all the artistic trades that interested him.
In East Africa he produced the designs for hundreds of buildings, many of them in the city of Maputo (Maputo) but also in Angola, in South Africa, and in Portugal. He worked pro-bono with founder Michael Stern to design the campus for the first multi-racial school in Southern Africa, the Waterford Kamhlaba United World College of Southern Africa in Eswatini.
Guedes was part of “Team 10”, a group of architects who assembled in July 1953 at the 9th Congress of CIAM and adopted a new approach to urbanism through impactful theoretical frameworks which influenced the development of European architectural thought during the late 20th century.
Arguably, one of Guedes' most famous buildings is the Smiling Lion Building from 1956 built in Mozambique. Guedes calls the style of this building STILOGUEDES which translates loosely as 'Style of Guedes'. The high level mural on the West façade is still intact and so is the "smiling lion" on the North corner. The lion is a small concrete casting with a smile hence the name of the building.
Exhibitions of his visual art have taken place at the Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon, among other venues.
Guedes bought works by Paul Klee in 1948, admiring his surrealist style and infantile themes. He made sculptures inspired by Paul Klee's Angels at the end of his career. One of his last sketches, made in 2015, was entitled 'A Tribute to Paul Klee'.
His rapid departure from Mozambique in 1974 along with other Portuguese subject to the 24/20 declaration (giving them 24 hours to leave and allowing them to take 20 kilograms of belongings) left his family almost penniless. Due to his reputation, he received an invitation to take the vacant chair of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
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