What Happened
I took a ride on a tuk-tuk motorcycle taxi around Maputo, Mozambique, fellow All Things Considered producer, Vincent Acovino. country reporting on changes to U.S. funding Africa.
Vinny noticed it first: There was something magical about a number of the concrete apartment blocks and government offices here. With half a a little googling, we gave ourselves an impromptu architecture of Amâncio "Pancho" Guedes. The late Portuguese-born architect designed some pretty cool buildings 1950s and '60s. They include the Prédio Abreu, Santos e Rocha pictured above, and other structures with evocative Smiling Lion apartment Squeezer church. Step into a small interior stairwell of The Dragon House, a mural in sparkling a spiky dragon with a toothy grin. It transforms what would otherwise be a dim stairwell.
Guedes designed more than 500 buildings , from churches to bakeries. I don't have the language to capture it: materials, combined with the playful use of shapes and murals. "Eclectic Modernist," I later learned, described. One critic brilliantly mixes the "sculptural and figurative with practical requirements and traditional local identity."
Maputo will change and I have to imagine survive. But stumbling into a town with a visual landscape Guedes' thumbprint was a delight. For an afternoon, riding through the city streets -air tuk-tuk, looking handiwork was a good time. Like an Easter concrete.
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