João Abel Manta was born in Lisbon in 1928. As the son of artists who also taught at technical and vocational schools in the Estado Novo regime, he had a liberal upbringing and the possibility the travel through Europe as a child, in what he was to describe as an “extraordinary childhood”. His father, the artist Abel Manta, a renowned portrait painter, came from Gouveia. Sheltered by a wealthy family, he studied at Lisbon’s Escola de Belas Artes in the very early years of the 20th century. It was in artists’ circles in Lisbon that Abel was to meet his future wife, Maria Clementina Carneiro de Moura, who was also a painter. An only child, João Abel Manta grew up in a house (now demolished) in Santo Amaro de Oeiras, interacting with some of the most important intellectuals of the day, who were friends of his parents. A close friend of the family was, for example, the novelist Aquilino Ribeiro, of whom the future architect’s father painted several well-known portraits. João Abel Manta himself would later provide illustrations for some of Ribeiro’s novels, such as A Casa Grande de Romarigães (1957) and O Esconjuro (1971), the latter work being commissioned after the author’s death. His mother was a favourite pupil of Columbano, who saw numerous artistic qualities in her.
João Abel’s parents felt a particular attraction for Paris, where his father had lived after graduating from art school and before João Abel was born. The family travels had Italy as their favoured destination, beginning with Genua, but invariably ending with a visit to the French capital. Their travels also extended to Spain, Britain and Holland, which left a strong impression on the young João Abel. He acquired a taste for drawing during his days spent at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière when he was roughly eight years old. Of one of his travels, - probably to Pompeii – he kept a photograph of himself with his mother that was taken in the ruins of an ancient Roman domus. Later, that photo inspired him to enrol in architecture.
At the Escola Superior de Belas Artes in Lisbon he was influenced by Cristino da Silva. Despite the latter’s conservative and authoritarian ways, João Abel recognised the importance da Silva would have in his training. The old master was later to propose João Abel Manta and his future partner, Alberto Pessoa, for architectural projects that were to prove to be fundamentally important in the context of the production of modern architecture in Portugal. He was also to be a frequent visitor to Manta’s works, bringing new generations of students to visit them. It is likely that during his education of Manta, he anticipated the creative capacities of the future architect.
Manta graduated in 1951, presenting as a final project for his architectural diploma a design for a shopping centre in Ajuda (Lisbon). From his academic training he retained essentially an idea of “discipline” and the practice of “rigorous design”. That methodology was also to be reflected in his work as a painter, designer, graphic artist and cartoonist, which were activities that became dominant in the late 1950s. Before this, however, he worked alone as an architect or in the Lisbon firm of Alberto Pessoa, whom he met through Francisco Keil do Amaral. While short-lived, his career as an architect bequeathed to contemporary Portuguese history some of its true modern moments, as we shall see.
It is not easy to reconstruct his life as an architect. In a box marked “G” Manta keeps in his apartment (he has kept archives of his professional life in cardboard boxes), one can find one of his rare career testimonies. It begins thus: “My work as an architect and urbanist took place in two studios. One with my colleague Alberto Pessoa (now deceased), for complicated projects, urbanisation plans, competitions, etc. Another, by myself, for more simple designs: houses, buildings without urbanistic integration, etc.” Further on he admits it was “difficult […] to indicate the origin of these works in terms of the studios”. He was then 80 years old and he was doing the lists by memory. It is on the basis of his own classification that re-tracing his itinerary is possible. Most of his works are apartment buildings in Lisbon (Calçada das Necessidades, Rua Ricardo Espírito Santo, Rua Antero de Quental, Rua D. Francisco Manuel de Melo and the Belém area). To this group one can add the building in Rua Nova do Loureiro (1956-1959, altered in the 1980s) in Bairro Alto, in which he currently resides. It was once one of his parent’s painting studios. The houses are distributed amongst Cascais (three houses), Santo Amaro de Oeiras and Costa de Caparaica. The latter was his summer house. For this house the landscaping was carried out by Gonçalo Ribeiro Teles, who worked with him at his office. Then there are the urbanisation plans, not all of them executed (Agualva-Cacém; Peniche, not executed; Avenida da Liberdade, not completed), and the offices at Avenida 24 de Julho (all Lisbon). Amongst the facilities designed one can highlight the multi-storey car park in Porto, a tea room in Peniche, a branch of the Caixa Geral de Depósitos bank in Mafra and the Municipal Swimming Pool in Areeiro in Lisbon. Of the various competitions he took part in and did not win, he essentially remembers the Casino do Estoril, which he lost to the duo Filipe Figueiredo/José Segurado. A project for a hotel in Gouveia – not listed – is amongst the material archived in this box. Together with Alberto Pessoa, he also designed a small modern hotel at the riverfront end of Avenida Infante Santo, which he seems to have forgotten.
Manta’s most important design projects feature at the beginning of this list he drew up. Amongst these are the housing complex in Avenida Infante Santo in Lisbon (1955-1959), which he identifies as having been designed with Alberto Pessoa only, and the Associação Académica de Coimbra (1954-1961), also the result of the same partnership. Designed without any collaboration was the magnificent modernist housing block in the heart of the Olivais Norte neighbourhood (1960), built on an elevated platform with pilotis.
Working with Alberto Pessoa, Manta gained maturity as an architect. Born in Coimbra, and nine years Manta’s senior, Pessoa had already made a name for himself when the partnership began. He gained renown for his technical qualities and for imprinting an indelible functionalist mark on his architecture. His membership of the Communist Party gave him a very specific political focus. Perhaps we wasn’t really a man of “architectural culture” and it was in that sense Manta recognised that he gave the firm a “more romantic” or artistic feeling. He was, however, a figure who moved freely between the various levels of theEstado Novo regime, as his professional career illustrates. Working with Cristino da Silva on the Administrative Committee for the work on the Coimbra University campus, he also executed design projects with Keil do Amaral and ran a firm with Abel Manta. The latter joined the firm in the early 1950s, remaining at least until the final make-up of the team that was to design the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation headquarters was defined (Pessoa, Ruy Athouguia and Pedro Cid). The Pessoa/Manta firm consisted of two architects, two drawers and two specialists from the field of engineering, one of them being the aforementioned Ribeiro Teles. Alberto Pessoa’s connections were certainly worth a lot as far as acquiring work was concerned. The commission for the Associação Académica de Coimbra complex can be traced to Cristino da Silva. The building – which Manta affirms was one of the most interesting projects he worked on – became a reference in terms of integration of the arts. Here he showed his mastery in the field of the fine arts, designing the panels on the main façade and the glazed tile panel in the courtyard garden. Official bodies had suggested artists such as Jorge Barradas. But, research by Nuno Rosmaninho and José António Bandeirinha would suggest that Pessoa insisted with the then Minister of Public Works, Arantes e Oliveira, that the commission for the artistic interventions should go to Manta. The mark Manta left on the complex was to make it a reference for this type of operation. His architectural training was decisive in this.
His abandoning of architecture was something that took place gradually. He was profoundly disenchanted with the architectural production, which he saw as too “geometric” and “not very creativ”. The modern architecture produced in Portugal was, in his opinion, far removed from that practised by “noteworthy masters”, in which he included Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. As he said, nothing compared to the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. Within the spectrum followed by his Portuguese colleagues, which Manta described as being affiliated in the “rigidity” of Mies van der Rohe, he found some of the architecture produced in Porto to be interesting. His admiration for American architects grew in these years. His discovery of London also dates from this period; he maintained a house there. The world of the arts was changing. The post-André Malraux Paris, he claimed, was not as interesting for him as the bohemian Paris he had got to know on his stays in the city with his parents. In the 1960s, enticed by a number of Lisbon newspapers – for example, the Diário de Notícias – for which he began working as an illustrator, he practically gave up his architectural work. José Cardoso Pires, who was later assistant editor of the Diário de Lisboa newspaper, was one of those responsible for this change. He had written three texts on Manta. He was later to write three articles on Manta. In one, published in the wake of the 1974 revolution in o jornal, he affirms: “Only few anti-fascists from before the 25 April revolution worked artistically in political intervention like João Abel did.” Manta did the illustrations for Cardoso Pires’ bookDinossauro Excelentíssimo, published in 1972. It is a fable about the life of the then recently deceased dictator that marked the political scene under [Salazar’s successor] Marcelo Caetano. Manta also branched out into stage design. Noteworthy collaborations are his design for a production of A Relíquia by Eça de Queirós (for whom Manta has declared his admiration) that ran in 1970 at the Teatro Maria Matos in Lisbon, adapted for the stage by Sttau Monteiro and directed by Artur Ramos; and, from the same year (and also with the same director), his designs for Kafka’s The Trial at the Teatro Villaret. He also designed tapestries (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, c.1969); tile panels (panels in Avenida Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 1970-1972, installed in 1982); and Portuguese paving (Praça dos Restauradores, Lisbon). But it was in his illustration work that his criticism of the Estado Novo society and a regime in its dying throes gained prominence. In 1971, he satirised architecture as a profession in a cartoon on the intensive construction going on in the Algarve.
As Cardoso Pires well understood, Manta’s most decisive way of achieving political intervention was through the medium of the cartoon. His acerbic view of a country transiting from dictatorship to democracy was shared by a generation of anti-fascists. His architecture remains on a less clear status level. Manta found in the Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias, established in 1981, a forum for intervention. He currently expresses himself best through painting, as shown in an exhibition at the Palácio Galveias in Lisbon in 2009. Architects, however, still thank him for the cover he designed for L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui in 1976, which for the first time highlighted Portuguese architecture en bloc on the international stage. In this famous illustration, the white walls on a blue background and archaic figures defined, in themselves, the architecture of a country. As a man of the generation that came to the fore after the 1st National Congress of Architecture in 1948, his severe criticism of the modern architecture produced in Portugal can today be seen as exceptional. At the time, he revealed exceptional courage and independence. |
* with Ricardo Lima.
[T.N.]: some quotations in this article were translated solely for the purpose of this publication.
JOÃO ABEL MANTA IN LUANDA
João Abel Manta designed the azulejo [glazed tile] panel around the winding staircase at the Hotel Presidente in Luanda. The commission was apparently down to Eduardo Anahory, who was responsible for the interior design of this hotel on the Luanda seafront. The building itself, opened in the early 1970s, was designed by José António Campino, a Portuguese-Angolan architect born in the town of Sertã who died in 1997. The Luanda panel is part of the same series as the extraordinary tiled wall in Avenida Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, for which it was a preparatory work. The tiles were manufactured in Portugal, probably at the Constância ceramics factory, the source of the tiles in the monumental panel in Lisbon. The latter’s composition suggests a geometric and abstract structure. At the time, a model was produced as a trial for its installation. But the panel in Luanda was so conceived that it could be assembled randomly by the workers without following a specific design. The dominant colour is cobalt blue.
The presence of three architects such as Manta, Anahory and Campino on the same architectural design project undoubtedly contributed to making this Angolan building a noteworthy part of the international heritage of the late Modern Movement. It reflects a rare investment in quality. In terms of the integration of the arts in architectural works, the Manta panel is an exemplary intervention; it does not stand out from the remaining architecture and yet defines the singularity of the space it is in. It is an abstract graphic piece that is clearly late modern in essence.
To this day, João Abel Manta has never visited Angola.