Relational Modernities

Portuguese-born Mozambican architect Amâncio “Pancho” Guedes (1925–2015) designed several hundred buildings that became icons of late-colonial African modernism. His expressive design language, the Stiloguedes, is even recognised as a distinct style in its own right.

Relational Modernities focuses on Guedes’s lesser-known work: the quieter, more austere buildings he designed for Swiss and British Protestant missionary societies in the then-Portuguese-ruled Mozambique: schools, student dormitories, and community centres. Architectural historian Silvia Balzan situates them within the unequal society and politics of the country in the later stages of colonial rule. She demonstrates how Guedes and the missionary societies created alliances and spaces that were inevitably intertwined with colonial structures, yet at the same time already open to a postcolonial future. As “relational modernity,” Guedes’s hybrid practice dissolved dichotomies between the colonizers and the colonized, the secular and the religious, Western modernity and Indigenous African culture.

Silvia Balzan reexamines Guedes’s legacy beyond stylistic eccentricity or missionary charity and assesses the sociopolitical and cultural significance of the buildings themselves, which continue to shape Mozambicans’ everyday lives to this day.