Deco Delirium
Art Deco in Belo Horizonte
Those that know me well, will remember that for many years I was, and still am if less so, obsessed with the history of the Soviet Union and more broadly Russian culture, its painting, cinema, literature and music. In my dreams I imagined myself as a Constructivist architect working alongside Mosei Ginzburg and Ivan Leonidov, imagining what a post-capitalist city might be like, redefining the social mission of the architect and pursuing the elusive solution to the formula “Form is a Function of X where X is an unknown that always emerges anew from the particular social and technological pre-conditions of the brief.”[i] Such ideas formed the programmatic basis of the studio that I ran many years ago in Glasgow, and even now they seem as good a manifesto for architecture as any. But I have a confession to make about my formalist alter ego and my longstanding love affair with art deco modernism. This could be to do with the fact that my maternal grandfather was a master plasterer and sculpted the sweeping interiors of Odeon cinemas in the 1930s. But the real reason is far more prosaic. I simply love the shapes and the colours that remind me of Yakov Chernikov’s drawings and the streamlined forms of Italian Futurism. For weeks on end, I laboured in the Glasgow print studio trying to perfect the exact shade of pistachio green that alongside crimson-pink is as at the centre of the Art Deco colour pallet. Predictably everything is done bigger and brasher in Brasil. Belo Horizonte, like Rio and Sao Paulo, is awash with the stuff, and these images are just some of the highlights of my walks around the city haphazardly photographing its rich treasure trove of buildings from the thirties and forties. I will be honest; I have little idea how these buildings are structured in section or how their plan is organised. I was simply drawn to their geometry; the curves, the abstract motifs, unexpected irrational angles, curious window openings, symbolic extrusions, the colours, and the allusions to the machine.
[i] For more on this, see my article, ‘Molodoi Chelovek, my origins lie in the past, but I am from the future’, (The Journal of Architecture, 22:3, 2017), or alternatively download from my website.