"The situation produces the philosophy, and that's the best sort, the one that flows from the situation"..Friedrich Schroeder Sonnenstern

Pancho Guedes is the father, the inventor of all the art works. He cannot tell the difference between painting, sculpture and architecture. He does all three with intermittent outbursts of success and notoriousness. He is obsessive and difficult. He sometimes works until he collapses. He believes it is possible to be a Renaissance man in all this decadence and he has literary pretensions. At home he is called Dada by his children and all their friends, which pleases him no end.

Amâncio Guedes is the spirit of Pancho Guedes, first revealed internationally in the pages of the Architectural Review. It was discovered by Banham who descended with him, to the bar basement at Queen Anne's Gate in 1960. It is the name that persists in frequent adverts and assessments.

A. d'Alpoim Guedes is the son of Pancho Guedes, the executor, the "responsavel por toda a obra excepto o betao armada"—in fact the Real Guedes.

It is he who lived and had a studio for 25 years at Rua de Nevala, 61 & 61A, in Lourenço Marques, and then lived in exile in Johannesburg and was Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand. He also goes by the name of A. d'A. M. Guedes— Adam Guedes — which is how he signs his bureaucratic correspondence and his cheques. All quite in order, A.D.A.M. G. being the initials of his long-winded birth certificated's name.

It is he who, together with his wife, edit the chaotic and bombastic writings of both Amâncio and Pancho Guedes. It is Adam and Dorothy that have managed to establish some sequence and order in the writings, as well as correcting the abominable spelling, of the other two in the foreign and back-to-front language they persist in using.

A. d'Alpoim Guedes is also the keeper of all the surviving drawings, paintings sculptures, photographs, toys, embroideries, models slides and words, which become more and more real every day. He is also the historian and the archivist, the appointed author ot the definitive catalogue.

a.d'alpoim guedes


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