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Amancio d'Alpoim Miranda Guedes is an architect, a sculptor, a painter, and many other things. He is known familiarly to many people as Pancho Guedes. He was born in Portugal in 1925 and spent most of his very creative life in Mozambique, where he made more than 500 designs for buildings, most of them built there, but some built in Angola, in South Africa, and in Portugal. For this and other reasons he is less well known than he ought to be in the rest of the world. His exuberant, eclectic, complex and thoughtful buildings and projects have been published occasionally, but they were so far from the post-war US-led commercial multinational styles in architecture that they have not been sufficiently recognised for their quality and originality. His visual imagination absorbed every influence, from the art of Africa to the Surrealists, and synthesised them into a style which is recognisably his own, however varied the results appear at first glance. He was a post-modern 20 years before the term was invented, and he is still very active, working in Portugal now, inventing new buildings, painting and sculpting out a home on a steep hillside near Sintra in Portugal. This website is intended to provide information about his extraordinary architecture and other work, and to begin a growing archive about him. The material here is basically structured around an issue of the magazine Arquitectura Portuguesa of July 1985 featuring his work, which he wittily entitled "Vitruvius Mozambicanus" divided into 25 'books'. There are sections which follow on his drawings, sculpture, paintings, individual buildings, and a page of links. Cedric Green, 2005
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