Nº 10, 1962 (reprint 1983) (Col. Nuno Salgueiro Lobo, obrigado)
Julian Beinart, "Malangatana" (pp. 22-27 + 10 páginas de ilustrações pb). Two poems, by Valente Malangatana (pp. 28-29). in Black Orpheus, pub. Mbari Artist and Writers Club, Ibadan, Nigéria, editors: Ezekiel Mphahlele, Wole Soynka e Ulli Beier.
É o 1º artigo (um dos 1ºs?) publicado fora de Moçambique sobre M.
Julian Beinart: "Amancio Guedes, Architect of Lourenço Marques", Architectural Revew, Londres, nº 129, April, 1961
Amancio Guedes, "Y aura-t-il une architecture?", Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, Paris, juin-juillet, nº 102, 1962, pp. 42-49 (no dossier "Architectures Fantastiques")
A. d'Alpoim Guedes, Les Mapogga*, in Aujourd'hui: Art et Architecture, Paris, nº 37, 1962 (fotos pb e cor de Pancho Guedes e Pedro Guedes, então com 12 anos), pp. 58-65)
pág. 58
* são actualmente referidos como Ndebele
Este foi um artigo pioneiro sobre os Ndebele e as suas casas pintadas, como se confirma em "Inventer une nouvelle illusion: le cas renomé des Southern Ndebele", de Giovanni Fontana Antonelli (em "ICOMOS Scientific Symposium: Place-memory-meaning: preserving intangible values in monuments and sites", 2005: http://www.international.icomos.org/victoriafalls2003/papers/B2 - 2 - Fontana Antonelli.pdf ): "Guedes a été le premier, en 1962, à souligner le formalisme architectural et sculptural des habitations" (a que se segue a ref. do artigo da Aujourd'hui: Art et Architecture, mas mal localizado como sendo a Architecture d'Aujoud'hui).
Antes desse artigo de 1962, aponta-se entre a bibliog. dos anos 50, de Betty Spence e Barrie Biermann, Mpogga, in Architectural Revew, Julho, 1954
ver os estudos de Peter Rich (aluno e colega de PG) sobre os Ndebele nos anos 80
ver tb: Mêmes in amaNdzundza architecture, Morne Fourie (1999, Electronic Thesis or Dissertation): http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/mq64111.pdf
Ester Mhlangu representa esta tradição Ndebele no meio da arte, com notoriedade internacional desde os Magiciens de la Terre, 1989.
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Peter Rich: Gagnant du prix de la culture 2009 du festival mondial de l’architecture à Barcelone
Centre d’interprétation Mapungubwe – Afrique du Sud par Peter Rich: Gagnant du prix de la culture 2009 du festival mondial de l’architecture à Barcelone
Entrevista
http://www.abitare.it/highlights/mandelas-yards/ (Posted on 04.07.2010)
ABITARE, The Mandela' Yeards
Peter Rich is the designer of the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre in South Africa, a project recently crowned as the 2009 “World Building of the Year”. I had the chance of meeting the architect committed “to be of service to the less privileged” in his office in Johannesburg.
Oana Stanescu - Peter, you are known for your research into the African vernacular and for your work as an architect, and you are also an activist and a teacher. How did you start?
Peter Rich - Instead of going to do my Beaux Arts training, I went and lived with African cultures, when they were still to be found on the ground, before apartheid moved them on. Then I became a professor for 30 years at the university and I also practiced. I was lucky Pancho Guedes was head of the Architecture Department and he encouraged people, if they taught design, to practice. He said you can’t teach design if you don’t practice. Pancho was a great mentor because was a painter, a sculptor, a Dadaist, a Surrealist, and he had an incredible energy. When we were at school we were very lucky, everyone who was a student or member of staff somehow exceeded their potential by about 300%, making you believe you could do anything and everything and the more you did the better you were. You could shoot a film, create sculpture, paint, perform in a play and make architecture as well. And as a result your architecture improved. That’s why at 64 I feel like I have just begun. Architecture is like a hobby, and now I have seven people in the office and I am enjoying it.
OS - What led you to the extensive studies of the Ndebele people?
PR - It was Pancho again who inspired me to look at Africa and into contemporary African art. He said: “If you keep photographing the Ndebele on the road when you come down here, why don’t you go and study them?” And that’s what I did: I documented and observed them. In the ’70s it was quite difficult, as a white person you were either coming to give them a fine or you were informing them they had to leave the land. It wasn’t good news. When they found that my intentions where honorable and I was this odd guy with a camera, then I became part of this network of people. It was a humbling experience.
OS - Do you recall your first impressions?
PR - I realized then that a woman that adorned her body for ritual practice, a woman who was going through the ceremony which celebrates the transition from girl to woman, was creating architecture, mural art and sculpture as well. She practiced many art forms at the same time, and she did it often and became very good at it. So she was doing exactly what people did in the Renaissance, although she was illiterate. It was as if she had Palladio’s The Four Books of Architecture next to her, she knew all these rules from an understanding of how the body works: she knew how to give a building prominence, how to deal with asymmetry, how to compose and how to organize art. It was just like when you look at a classical building and there is a rhythm, and she was just as articulate. And the Ndebele had a series of art forms which informed one another. I also realized that these people, through interacting with white suburbia where they saw Art Deco and pictures of Cape Dutch houses, also did things similar to those of architects. We see what we want and we take it, and it’s what we do with it that makes it particular (pointing at a picture of a Ndebele house in which the traditional decoration on the fence is depicting a plane). You’re not really reinventing anything. So it became a very dynamic, interactive exchange. Africans are quite articulate in their architecture.
OS - How does your research of the vernacular inform your architecture?
PR - Before 1994 I only had the opportunity to experiment with little houses because I refused to work for the apartheid government, but since then I have had the chance to work on many community projects around cultural tourism, where I could almost reinvent public space for black people who had lost their knowledge of it. In some ways you are a bit of a missionary, you try to show people what value they have. I am currently doing a building which deals with cultural space, and I am trying to educate the client in order to show them that what they have in their culture is more sophisticated then the BMW showroom they aspire to.
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