This is where all the evidence is collected, collated, manipulated - you get the picture ha ha ha - click on the link to see it all
Some examples of the evidence ... from last weekend for starters ....
RUN #1339 24 JULY 2010
THE PANCHO GUEDES RUN:
Pancho´s Maputo, 1948 – 75
An architect´s influence 
Maputo was very lucky to have Pancho Guedes’s influence on its architecture, since the replacement of the grand classical ‘colonial styles’ with internationalist architectural features – plain and simple blocks with functional, utilitarian approach to cheap housing for the people – would have left a very dull city. He fought with engineers, architects and city planners to create forms that avoided simplicity and presented unique images of other art forms – African tribal sculpture and settlement traditions, European paintings and surrealism – and combined the curves of nature as well.
Where did he start this process? As a 7 year old boy when he first arrived in Mozambique? Or on his return to Europe after university in South Africa? – loaded with pictures and designs of buildings that he struggled to visit; at the same time absorbing ideas from Salvador Dali, Chirico, Gaudi and others. He learnt, from Dali, that artists and therefore all architects,
"..must become carnivorous fish, swimming between two kinds of water — the cold water of art and the warm water of science”.
He avoided being branded with the labels of architecture. As he said very recently (in July 2009), at the huge exhibition of his work in Lisbon, he had ‘families’ of buildings that spanned 25 different categories of architecture. The freer Brazilian style had a major influence, while he also respected the values of modern greats from Europe. Of course, it wasn’t easy to get his spikey forms, complex curved sections and spaces, shell-like roofs, textured walls, sculptured chimneys and ethnic images past the simple-minded city planners. Nevertheless he managed to sneak his complex signature, between 1950 and 1974, into many functional blocks of flats and offices; as well as houses, banks, restaurants, churches, schools, a bakery and other buildings you will see. There are many other creations of his that you won’t see – some were laughed out of the municipal planning offices, others were ‘victims of war’, as he said himself. More were allowed to decay – neglect from families abandoning them and squatters moving in.
His originality is incredible; living in Maputo I am often struck by the lightening bolt of a glimpse of something he created. In the midst of the concrete blocks and straight lines there is a curve of colour and a flash of light contrasting with shadow, a physical image that penetrates the environment like a rainbow, after a grey miserable wet English afternoon in November.
Born in Lisbon 1925, Pancho now lives in Sintra, Portugal. Jerry Flood 2009
RUN #1338 17 JULY 2010
