Contact Artefacts please if you have any comments or more information regarding this record.	Menu Home Upfront Now Up Books Towns Structures People Firms Lexicon		House Desirello - House Moslein Illovo, Johannesburg, Gauteng Amancio d’Alpoim Miranda (Pancho) GUEDES: Architect

Date: 1965 Type: Homestead Status: Extant Street: First Ave   Click to view large map Coordinates: 26°07'41.98" S 28°03'07.42" E Alt: 1635m

Pancho Guedes delivered a lecture to the Architectural Association in London in 1980 presenting seven related 'stories' about some of his recent work, all of which were 'Bubblies', his twenty-fifth style. Bubblies are a family of designs all incorporating curved forms. The seventh story was titled 'An Impersonation' and described a large house built in the suburb of Illovo, Johannesburg. A story about a house I have been busy with on and off for the last sixteen years. Some time this year I became involved with it again. This time I am impersonating another architect who is altering the house I did sixteen years ago. The house that I invented and built 16 years ago in Johannesburg for some Italian friends went through many adventures. At first it was a soft house with walls twisting and turning. It curled up like a snail to enclose a rotund courtyard. It was only after the Desirellos had turned down that kind of nonsense and also not been enthusiastic about the alternative in the shattered box manner that I got to the Italianate alternative (Ill. 1). In that guise the house helped to familiarise me with the work of Palladio quite some time before the present universal enthusiasms. The design plays a strange and rich game of scales and is fragmented into six houses (Ill. 2). There is the car house, the living house, the servant house, the garden house, the water house and the party house. The water house is a roofless room sunk into the earth and filled with water. Three of the other houses have pyramidal hats. The garden house has a concrete pergola and the party house has an athletic reinforced concrete roof with muscle but not much protection. I detailed everything most thoroughly and designed much of the furniture. The windows and doors are like elaborate cupboards and are made of chanfuta, a red Mozambican hardwood. The internal walls are broken up by a number of horizontal bands in chanfuta. The internal light fittings are chanfuta boxes of various sizes. There are sixteen cubes in the living room ceiling alone, each cube marking out the intersection of the ceiling beams. The double door which separates the living room from the dining room consists of two screens of chanfuta grids with square voids which swing open on elaborate brass hinges. The ground floor is paved in edge-to-edge Napoleon marble with underfloor heating. The pattern of the marble reflects the pattern of the ceiling structure. Some of the pieces of furniture have translucent marble tops which light up. The fireplace is granite with a polished brass interior. The five houses all light up externally at night. The external lights are of two kinds – recesses with chanfuta grid screens and concrete boxes. In each of the four light pillars which mark out the swimming pool, I defined the idea of the whole design as well as making a portrait of Mr Desirello. They are quite strange personages standing stiffly and robot-like above their reflections, guarding each of the four corners of the pool. The house was quite beautifully built. The foreman became increasingly possessive during construction and gave some trouble towards the end. The woodwork was wonderfully finished by two Portuguese carpenters who had worked with me in Mozambique and squatted on the job. I had the windows, doors and cupboards and much of the furniture made in Mozambique, and it was taken in trucks to Johannesburg to be installed. Some time after the house was completed the Desirellos decided to leave South Africa and go and live in Milan or Buenos Aires. The house had got quite a reputation by then and there were a number of passionate suitors when it came on to the market. The house was sold, at a good profit, to the Mosleins. The Mosleins needed extra accommodation, but I think they also wanted to do something to the buildings so that it would become their own house. They phoned me and asked me to come to see them so I would design some additions and alterations. I carried on with the idea of the kraal of a house and drew two more little houses – a separate flat for the big children and another servant’s house with a roof terrace. There were also some other proposals for changes. I wanted particularly to remove the ugly canvas awning over the glazed doors leading to the swimming pool, which had been ordered by the real estate agents who were selling the house, and substitute it with a tent-like arrangement. Only the new extra steel letters that I had made in Lourenco Marques to change the name of Desirello to Moslein were installed. None of the other proposals were carried out. Some time this year the Mosleins asked me to design a number of additions and alterations, and I am now in the throes of finalising drawings. I found that I could not impersonate the architect that had done the house sixteen years ago, and instead I have turned myself into somebody else who is doing alterations and additions to a house I did sixteen years ago. The new proposals consist of a large round garden room with a glazed connection to the garden house which is also to be enclosed. The existing party house on the axis is to be glazed and slightly altered. A new round car porch is to be built next to the existing car house. An extra servant’s room is to latch on to the existing servants’ terrace which is enclosed. The living house is to be connected to the adjoining houses by glazed bay window elements. A basement wine cellar is to be built under the garden room. It is to be reached by a spiral stair to be built at a corner of the garden room. The Mosleins have accepted all the proposals except for the large circular room, with which I am most fascinated because it is such a disturbance to the formal, axial and austere array of cubic and pyramidal forms. The rest is an interesting superimposition of one architecture upon another, very much as buildings in Portugal switched from the Gothic to the Renaissance at the beginning of the sixteenth century and just carried on. _________________________________________ Extract from a transcript of a talk delivered to the Architectural Association (AA) in London in 1980 during an exhibition of Pancho Guedes' work hosted by the AA and arranged by his son Pedro Guedes. The talk was published by the AA. Guedes, Pancho. Recent Work. Annals of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Volume 1 No 1. Winter 1981-1982. pp 129-132. Submitted by Pedro Guedes via William Martinson from the Pancho Guedes archive.