JA – We wanted to challenge you to talk about the beautiful and beauty…
Pancho Guedes – Beauty is the girlfriend of the beautiful…
The beautiful in architecture is always changing, just as the beautiful in general is always changing. The beautiful is part of our cultures and each culture decides what is beautiful; and the beautiful is in constant change. In Portugal, we have a situation today where the beautiful has been lost. We all knew the beautiful as sanctioned by the State and the beautiful of others; and the African beautiful. There were all kinds of beautiful. But now, with democracy, nobody knows what is beautiful and the government has given up on beauty: it doesn’t classify what beautiful is; it doesn’t know what beautiful is: now it likes this, now it likes that. There may be a range of candidates but no one really serves likes they served when we had the Estado Novo. The Estado Novo knew perfectly well that it was António [Salazar] who decided what was beautiful. He had people who helped him, and so the beautiful remained beautiful eternally, until there was a little revolution here that put an end to their beautiful. That’s when there stopped being the beautiful in Portugal and we got a multiplicity of beautifuls.
Are the buildings you have built beautiful?
Buildings in general are beautiful… Some of my buildings had an extraordinary presence; that is, or could be, one of the qualifications for what beauty in architecture is. Most of the people who saw the fangs [on the “stiloguedes” buildings], who saw the arcades of the “arched styles”, who saw the curves [of the “rounds” or “twisted spaces turned inside out”, etc.] thought they were strangely beautiful or pretty1.
Is there a difference between beautiful and pretty?
There is a big difference between the strange and the beautiful or the pretty. Beautiful and pretty are really the same thing, interpreted by the social class in which we live, aren’t they?
You lived in [Portuguese] Africa and mentioned how different cultures have different notions of beauty… Do you think your buildings are as beautiful in Africa as they could be in Portugal or Europe?
My buildings in Africa were strange, which was a quality of the beautiful in Africa, that they were buildings that look more like apparitions, something that was strange, that was tropical.
Here buildings are much more perfect, simple, orthogonal and white.
Is that the “western notion” of beauty? “Simple, orthogonal, white buildings”?
I suppose Portugal and Portuguese architects are obsessed with things being very simple, with just a hint of monumentality and repetition.
Like the Baixa Pombalina in Lisbon?
No, because the Baixa Pombalina accepted all sorts of frivolity and the modern Portuguese, the state Portuguese, the municipal Portuguese always has to be clear-cut and sad.
So, in a sense there was a reinstatement of a certain taste (or “beauty”), not that of the dictatorship but of democracy.
It’s not a taste, it’s a disaster. What was the great ground-breaking change? Post-modernism. The ambassador of post-modernism in Portugal was the kid [Tomás Taveira] who worked for [Francisco] Conceição Silva and who travelled to the United States and came back all excited… The great upheaval was the introduction of historicism, the historicist freedom that sprung up everywhere, a historicism that had absolutely nothing Portuguese about it; nothing of the Portuguese house from that research into the Portuguese style of the poor, of the village, from that book that Association of Architects published at a certain point [Popular Architecture in Portugal, National Union of Architects, 1961]. That post-modernism was already a falsification of a Neo-classic language.
What is the most beautiful building you have ever seen?
Oh my... That’s a difficult one; I think it’s very easy to find beautiful buildings in other cultures, such as the buildings African women in central Transvaal make and then paint with large geometric designs reminiscent of palaces and houses and the reinterpretation they do of the houses white people live in.
Is it easier to find beauty outside western culture, is that it? Is that the strangeness you were talking about?
Yes, it’s the strange thing; because beautiful buildings are beautiful in a very fragmented way. [Francesco] Borromini’s church [San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, 1634] has extraordinary sculptural parts, extremely interesting fragments. There are two basement windows no one has ever published that are amazing. But then the whole thing is understandably lost through intervention by the supreme authority that determined how things were to be. I would guess that Borromini on his own could have done a lot better, with a lot more fun.
For you, beauty is more in what is dissonant or strange than what is perfect or canonic. Is that so?
I think so. Another example is Michelangelo, who was not a classicist; he was more of a Neo-classicist than anything else. He began to play about with the rules of classic composition and to use a different language.
A language that was very much his own, not reproducible…
Well, it became another communal language.
We have sought to distinguish Apollonian beauty from Dionysian beauty: are you more interested in the latter, more “exuberant” type, as it were?
I’m interested in the extraordinary, the strange.
Were Le Corbusier’s buildings beautiful?
Le Corbusier’s designs were beautiful; the buildings were abstractions of the designs.
But what is more beautiful: the Le Corbusier of the 1920s with the Villa Savoye [Poissy, Paris, France, 1928-1931] or the Le Corbusier of La Tourette [Lyon, France, 1953-1960] and Ronchamp [Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut, 1950-1955]?
They are two completely different personalities. The first is a very guarded Swiss man who was just starting out in Paris, establishing a professor’s studio and with a huge rigidity and a very intense abstract notion, first in the Villa Stein [Garches, Paris, França, 1926-1928] and then in the Villa Savoye as a suspended box, a demarcated box standing free on the land.
Modern architects – Le Corbusier’s contemporaries – basically tried to create a new canon of beauty to replace the classic canon…
There is a lot of classicism in Le Corbusier; just as conversely, in another architect, [Frank Lloyd] Wright, there is much more of a forced rusticality of the house on the prairie, the house in America, the house of the new arrival, where there were no other houses, the cave, the house made of stone; it’s all a varied alternative of what current Americans have now forgotten. It’s weird that the same mentality produced those fantastic buildings, the first large buildings on the lake shorefront in Chicago, in which there are huge stone expanses on the ground floor; there is an awareness that they are in a different place, a wild place2.
By assuming eclecticism you enter a field where beauty doesn’t really come into it, because eclecticism is a difficulty…
Being eclectic allows me to have 25 types of beautiful.
You have also taught. How do you introduce the subject of beauty to your students? Do you transmit an “idea” of beauty to them?
No. I try to show a way in to beauty through the strange, without telling them it’s strange; they [the students] just find it weird. For example, when Jorge [Nunes] was a student of mine he didn’t see the strangely beautiful; he just saw weird.
What is so attractive about the strange? Why is it so interesting?
Because the strange is kind of lost. The strange is unique, all other work by architects is always a reduction and a return to a whiff of neo-classicism.
Did the strange bring you closer to the truth in Africa? By that we mean were you more in context by being strange?
The strange drove artists-architects like [Antoni] Gaudí. Curiously enough, Gaudí was able to introduce the strange into the Holy Catholic Faith, an achievement that is sublime, incredible3.
Do you think that architects today – who have great problems in terms of finding work, surving in the market and asserting themselves – could find in the strange a path towards establishing themselves? Or does everything demand that they be clear, unequivocal and beautiful?
Doing the strange is very difficult today. Because they don’t have work, young architects tend to just copy what’s being done by other firms that already have a standard model, because the developer is always terrified, wants to create an image; but he wants that image to be practically identical to another firm that has achieved success; he doesn’t want anything “strange”.
So doing strange is more difficult and more complex than doing beautiful?
Or you add a strange twist to the beautiful, leaving it still looking traditional. There is a house I did in Beloura [that shows that]. Beloura is a piece of land belonging to a bank that decided to sell plots, on the road linking Cascais and Sintra. For one of the plots, a lady doctor insisted to her husband that I should design the house, because I had done her parents’ house. The parents’ house is a neo-Indian house. The parents were an Indian couple – the father was a doctor – whose house I built facing the Hotel Polana [in Maputo, Mozambique].
The house [in Beloura] is a very strange palace, very Portuguese, with a differentiated scale (a scale that first looks big, then looks small). (When I come back here, I’ll take you there and we can see the whole house). The house was done in bits; there was a contractor for the shell, then it was finished in stages. It has a lot of African-style carpentry, with a fantastic carpenter who at the time didn’t have work.
There is a book, a very interesting concept, by Anthony Vidler –
The Architectural Uncanny – about the unusual, the disquieting, the perplexing in architecture. Vidler makes a reading of a number of historic and contemporary architectural works where he finds precisely that “uncanny”. That idea of – perhaps not looking for – but finding the unusual or, perhaps, letting it happen, is that how you see yourself ?
I don’t know the book... But it’s more about finding it when you’re doing the design. The extraordinary emerges in different ways; it emerges like something that wasn’t there…
When one speaks of the canonic beauty of the 1950s/60s, one notices that you weren’t interested in continuing along that path… Do you think your artist’s temperament makes you seek out the “strange” things?
I don’t know anymore, but I suppose it does. My first work in Lourenço Marques [now Maputo] was the Casa Poligonal [for Grace and Otto Barbosa, 1950], with the assistance of Frank Lloyd Wright. All I had was one house of his with a polygonal plan and [my design] is a spatial reinterpretation of that plan and a photograph I found in [Henry-Russell] Hitchcock’s book on Wright [In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, New York : Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942], which was the only book I had on Wright.
So you choose that more difficult path right at the beginning…
I went for the option that there were non-orthogonal alternatives for spatiality; it is also an exploration I do in do in my round designs, which are never realised. (There is also a suspended building project, the Malagantana Cultural Centre, which is also completely round).
Were you never worried that what you were designing might be ugly? With all that twisted and complex geometry, were you never worried that the result would be ugly from the compositional or construction point of view?
I wanted my buildings to be strange; strange and theatrical, and to go against the convention of the orthogonal. (Where we know there is a passageway that takes you to another orthogonal volume with a number of orthogonal windows…)
So it bothers you when things are predictable?
Yes. But I am also interested in buildings being easy to read, that there is a spatial organisation of continuity, like in the Machava church, which has things that are completely out of scale – the crosses, the corners…
Is it a strange church?
Yes, it is a strange church.|
1. For a contextualisation of the work of Pancho Guedes, see, for example, Pancho Guedes. Vitruvius Mozambicanus, Lisbon: Museu Colecção Berardo, 2009.
2. Here Mr Guedes is referring to the architects of the Chicago school, including Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) and Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), amongst others.
3. Here the reference is to Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia Basilica (Barcelona, Spain, 1882-1926).