Pancho Guedes

Amâncio d'Alpoim Miranda "Pancho" Guedes (Lisbon, Portugal, 13 May 1925 – Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, 7 November 2015) was a Portuguese architect, sculptor and painter. An archetype Eclectic Modernist born in Lisbon, Portugal, he spent much of his life in Portuguese Mozambique from when he was 7 years old.[1] In East Africa he produced the designs for hundreds of buildings,[2] many of them in the city of Lourenço Marques (Maputo).

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. Aside from his large-scale architectural projects, he was also a sculptor and painter. There have been exhibitions of his visual art at the Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon, among other venues. After the events of the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon, he left newly independent Mozambique in 1974. Mozambique was officially established in 1975 as the People's Republic of Mozambique. 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.[2] Due to his reputation, he received an invitation to take the vacant chair of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.[3]

Pancho Guedes died on 7 November 2015 at the age of 90.[4] Pancho Guedes was a descendant of Portuguese nobleman Luis de Alpoim.