Statements of Representative People Regarding Casa da Flor

Many will be shocked that, in my opinion, Casa da Flor is among the most important specimens of Brazilian architecture. As I see it, it is a remarkable example of spontaneous architecture, poetic and free of any impositions. As for the façade, you would swear it is by Gaudí.
Ariano Suassuna. Revista AU - Arquitetura e Urbanismo, 94, February-March 2001.

The traveler lights a cigarette and smokes silently. Today he is not thinking about the similarities between Gabriel's house and Gaudí's architecture. He just looks at the shards and thinks about his own existence, which - like anybody else's - is made of the fragments of everything bygone. At a certain point, however, these fragments start to take shape.
Paulo Coelho, writer.

And there, for almost a century, lived a lonely black man, shaping stones into flowers. Uselessly. Playfully. Beautifully, with the purity to be found only in the truly enlightened.
Affonso Romano de Sant´Anna, poet.

One single language was not enough to this author. He would build, carve, paint, glue, coat. And yet expression was still eluding him: that's when he would write inside of the house, making it into a memorandum notebook, a file, a dictionary. The poetical opus was stretched to its very limits.
Carlos Nelson Ferreira dos Santos, architect and anthropologist.

... he became a missionary, the house became a temple and the flowers became the deity's beauty.
Carlos Byington, Jungian psychoanalyst.

Had Breton and Dali seen [the house], they would sing their praises wholeheartedly, for everything in it is surreal. Everything there would burgeon like blooming flowers.
Fernando Fuão, architect.

Its visual effects are as lovely and unexpected as those of Gaudí's Park Guell walls, in Barcelona.
Ítalo Campofiorito, architect.

Gabriel Joaquim dos Santos, the creator and lonely dweller of Casa da Flor, succeeded during his lifetime in integrating fantasy and reality, in materializing his emotion and literally inhabiting his dream. His dwelling is a live structure, a body, a heart,
Amelia Zaluar, researcher.

First and foremost, it is the victory of a destitute man over the apparent banality of life, over his poverty and neediness. ... He would still use those very things useless to anybody else, even to the poor. Useless, that is to say, except to Beauty. And that is how he revealed Beauty and Art as the ultimate redemption of useless things.
Ferreira Gullar, poet.