Edifício Tonelli
The Edifício Tonelli is a residential and commercial building in the Mozambican capital Maputo . The building, designed by Pancho Guedes in 1954–58 , is located on the corner of Avenida Vladimir Lenine / Avenida Patrice Lumumba / Rua do Rádio, the address is Avenida Patrice Lumumba 1191-1217. It is shaped from the beginning by the influences of early modernism . The twelve-story building is visible from afar due to its location on the hillside of Maxaquene.
history
Pancho Guedes designed the building on behalf of the Italian engineer Franco Tonelli. The urban development plan by João Aguiar - therefore also known under the name Plano Aguiar - provided for a mixed use of offices and living at this point. Guedes designed a twelve-storey building which, due to its size alone, achieved new dimensions in urban architecture. The main reason for this was the rise in the price of living space after a large number of Portuguese people had left the mother country in the 1940s and 1950s and settled in the colony of Mozambique . The original plan was for the structure to be the first of a group of five structures on the Maxaquene slope. However, there was no realization of the other four houses.
Originally, it was envisaged that Guedes would design the building and that the client Tonelli or his construction company would then erect it himself. Tonelli himself had accumulated too much debt at the beginning of the construction, so a subcontractor of the state-owned Banco Nacional Ultramarino (BNU) took over this task. After completion, the house passed into the ownership of the colonial bank and thus became one of the bank's first employee houses.
construction
The building is characterized by its division into residential and commercial areas. The first three floors are intended for shops, warehouses and garages, the remaining nine for living. The main entrance is to what is now Avenida Patrice Lumumba (formerly Avenida Miguel Bombarda ). Guedes used the length of the slope to plan a basement floor so that access leads directly to the first floor.
Two aspects are distinctive for the building: On the one hand, the lower areas intended for shops are set back slightly, which makes the residential floors look slightly protruding. At the same time, the facade art serves as a visual divider between the two areas. Another distinctive feature of the building is its division into the east and west wings, which is achieved by arranging the staircase in the middle.
The entire building comprises 56 apartments, of which 40 are one-room apartments with 52 square meters and 16 four-room maisonette apartments with 104 square meters. The apartments are entered through galleries on the south side of the house. The living rooms and balconies of the 56 apartments in particular face north-west and thus receive a lot of light. The kitchens and washing areas (in the four-room apartments), on the other hand, have less light and are therefore consistently on the south-western side. The bathrooms and toilets are spacious and have no windows. For Gueden himself, better lighting of the apartments was more important than a view of the sea. The galleries for the one-room apartments are three meters wide. For the four-room apartments, Guedes created separate galleries two meters wide for employees and four meters wide for residents. Overall, the four-room apartment is completely separated between the staff area and the living area, an expression of the colonial social structure of the time.
style
The facade corresponds to the typical features of early architectural modernism. Guedes himself referred to the house as a "habitable shelf" ( prateleira habitável) . The “shelf effect” is created by the strict horizontal lines, which have the same dimensions on every floor, especially the 5.30 meter long balconies. The “habitable boxes” ( caixas habitáveis ) are located on these floors , each 5.20 meters wide and 10.30 meters long, which corresponds approximately to a width / length ratio of 1: 2.
Due to the strict horizontal lines and the quasi separable residential units, Guedes strongly followed the ideals of Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation and his machines à habiter. At the same time, according to Miguel Santiago, a distancing from Le Corbusier can be seen: the use of certain materials as well as the described (optical) division between living and work as well as between the left and right wing of the house would break with Le Corbusier's doctrines. Ana Magalhães also describes the work as an "interpretation of the early Corbusian prototype". In terms of architectural style, his works Edifício Dragão (1951–53), the Edifício para António Fernandes (1955) and the Apartamentos e Lojas na Maxaquene (1956) correspond to the style of Edifício Tonelli. The Prédio TAP / Montepio de Moçambique (1960) by the architect Alberto Soeiro also corresponds to this style.
On three sides of the building - towards today's Jardim Tunduru (west), on the balcony side (north) and on the gallery side (south) - Guedes had decorative plaster facade art that he designed himself. The art designed with color and engravings in the plaster should resemble that of the Mapogga people. Similarities can be seen above all with the art attached to the Bloco Habitacional O Leão Que Ri (1957).
Changes
Originally, no classic apartments were planned for half of the fifth floor, but comprised eleven dormitories and four bathrooms for so-called “indigenous employees”. However, shortly after the opening, this proved to be inappropriate. In 1968 the owner, Fundo do Investimento do Ultramar, commissioned Guedes to renovate the floor. These were converted into one-room apartments, but had to forego a two-meter entrance area at this point due to the limited space.
In addition to the renovation of the fifth floor, the basement floor was later dispensed with or added and converted. As part of this renovation, some larger decorative facade elements by Guedes were also destroyed, so that only the elements on the north-western, narrow side remain.
The building is still inhabited today. Among other things, there is a restaurant on the ground floor. At times, central government authorities were housed on the first and second floors.
The building is not a listed building, but is listed in the Portuguese monument database Sistema de Informação para o Património Arquitectónico , which also includes works by former Portuguese colonies, under the number 31724.
Web links
- Photo of the building when it was opened
- More photos with additional description (port.)
- Entry in the database Património de Influência Portuguesa (HPIP) of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (port.)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Ana Tostões (Ed.): Arquitetura Moderna em África: Angola e Moçambique . 1st edition. Caleidoscópio, Lisbon 2014, ISBN 978-989-658-240-1 , p. 290 ff .
- ^ Swiss Architecture Museum (ed.): Pancho Guedes. An alternative modernist / An alternative modernist. S AM, no. 3 . Christoph Merian Verlag and Swiss Architecture Museum, Basel 2007, ISBN 978-3-85616-353-2 , p. 19 .
- ↑ a b Miguel Santiago Fernandes: Pancho Guedes - Metamorfoses Espaciais . Colecção Arquitectura. Caleidoscópio, Casal de Cambra 2007, ISBN 989-8010-71-1 , p. 74 .
- ↑ a b Ana Magalhães: A Unité como modelo inevitável: três exemplos de habitação colectiva em Angola e Mozambique. (PDF, 15.7 MB) In: Optimistic Suburbia. Large Housing Complexes for the Middle Class Beyond Europe. Ana Vaz Milheiro; Filipa Fiúza; João Cardim; Rogério Vieira de Almeida, 2015, accessed June 5, 2016 (Portuguese).
- ^ Tiago Lourenço: Edifício Tonelli. In: Sistema de Informação para o Património Arquitectónico (SIPA). 2011, accessed May 31, 2016 (Portuguese).
Coordinates: 25 ° 58 ′ 16.6 ″ S , 32 ° 34 ′ 34 ″ E