Lourenço Marques | "Saipal o pao da Cidade" | Pancho Guedes

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"Saipal o pao da Cidade"
Pancho Guedes

The Saipal Bakery was the headquarters and factory of the Lourenço Marques Baker's Co-operative They called themselves Saipal o pao da Cidade - The Bread of the City. The building was designed around the machinery layouts supplied by the German manufacturers of the ovens and other equipment. Unfortunately the machines did not know how to make Portuguese bread and refused to be adjusted to do so. The bakers fought amongst themselves and Saipal soon fell apart. In its early days Saipal had a powerful symbolic charge - the bakers loved it and explained often how marvellous it was that I had made their building in the shape of a huge Portuguese bread. All the bread cupboards in their various depots throughout the city had superimposed cutouts of the elevation in wood riding the top shelf. I had not been thinking of a Portuguese bread loaf. The section has been generated out of two parabolic arches worked on over and over again together with an engineer, so that the arches would only need very little reinforcement and theoretically none. The best part of Saipal is the lateral courtyard which resulted from the provision for future expansions of the factory area for Saipal to make biscuits when it was not making bread. The intersection of the arches and pillars resulting from a careful analysis of the loads became monumental personages seeming to step away from the rest of the building transfixed by a shaft of emptiness where neutral zone is. The recent Red Model of three bays of Saipal where the partial section turns into the full section exaggerates the idea of the building. It is a better and more perfect building than the temporary bakery and it is also an instant ruin. It is the son of Saipal built 25 years after the first Idea, and it makes it clear why I dismissed any sort of chronology long ago.





Fonte: http://www.guedes.info
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