A Poetic Brand of Architecture
Amelia Zaluar

Rio de Janeiro. São Pedro da Aldeia. A tiny house. A jewel. A masterpiece of spontaneous architecture inspired by the dreams and daydreams of a poor, black, semi-literate man. The Casa da Flor, built by Gabriel Joaquim dos Santos (1892 -1985), a mere hand at the salt-works, whose mother was a Brazilian Indian and whose father was a former slave.

Since his very childhood Gabriel - a well-defined artistic temper - felt that he would have to live by himself, in order to let his great creativity unfurl. As early as 1912, the year he turned twenty, he started building a house, next to his own family's place: small, with a low roof and only three rooms - a living room, a bedroom and a storage room for odds and ends. Little by little, as he would get hold of the necessary materials, he built his wattle and daub house, having also used stones on the floor and some walls.

Being a dreamer, he foresaw in his sleep, in 1923, an ornament that embellished his house. What should he do? Give up the dream, ban from his memory such a beautiful vision brought up by his unconscious? How was he to solve the problem of not having the means to buy the materials he needed in order to make that vision come true? At that point an idea popped up in his mind; and so bizarre it was that many of his relatives and neighbors started considering him an eccentric as he took upon himself the task to which he consecrated the 63 years he still had to live: to use the rubbish cast away alongside the little roads of his district, to search those heaps of debris that everybody keeps away from - shards of earthenware, of chinaware, of glass, of wall tiles, of a whole bunch of things considered useless, such as old knick-knacks, spent light bulbs, shells, pebbles, chains, metal lids, terracotta pipes, discarded automobile headlights... Wisely he would remark that he had made a house "out of nothing".

Ever inspired by dreams and daydreams, he started creating flowers, leaves, mosaics, bunches of grapes, columns and fantastic looking sculptures that he would set inside or outside the house. He would invent lamps out of spent light bulbs; niches in which he could keep a whale bone or some prettier or showier knick-knack; frames for pictures attached to the walls; a bookcase that he used to call "the books altar"; benches and cupboards made of masonry, sensuously adorned, covered by colored tiles. He would either engrave or mold inscriptions in fresh mortar in order to single out his most remarkable works... The result turned out to be a composition of an amazing plastic richness, a kind of intuitive baroque created by a marginal, solitary artist. There was nothing like the so-called noble materials at all: the unserviceable, the spoiled, the ugly, the useless would become, as seen by his visionary eyes, precious raw material for the artistic creation. Being a true alchemist, he would explain: "Every tiny shard turns into a thing of beauty."

As he chose to metamorphose trash into art, Gabriel, isolated in a corner of South America, became part of a group of innovators - Picasso, Paul Klee, Braque, Kandinski, Miró, among others - who, in the early years of the Twentieth Century, in Europe, revolutionized the artistic concepts accepted until then.

Being a deeply religious man, he would ascribe to God the realization of his work, which he considered a fruit of divine inspiration: "What it is, I do not know... There is a mystery in my life that I myself cannot understand. People work, but they have to learn how to work. A carpenter must go through an apprenticeship. I didn't learn from anybody. I didn't have any school at all. I learned from the air, from the winds... This is not something of my own, it is a God given intelligence: there crop those things up in my memory and I go and do everything the way I dreamt it.

Gabriel was proud of his intelligence and its creations. His eyes would sparkle with mischievousness whenever he said his stuff was worthless and no money could be made out of it. And then he would acknowledge: "I feel happier working with shards, because modern things, new things won't be seen by anybody. One steps into a big town, and everything there is so modern, so well organized, worth so much money. What people see, there, is the power of richness. Whereas what they like seeing here is the power of poverty."

Gabriel's work - the work of a penniless artist, who never sat at an elementary school desk, who had no access to the media, who saw very little of conventional art (he only knew and admired the old churches and convents of his area) - is a live proof that the sparkle of creation in a human being does not depend on formal education, race, sex or culture.

With his unique and poetic opus he became a member of the highly exclusive group of "builders of the imaginary", that is to say, of those artists / architects who shunned the traditional patterns and created forms dictated by a fantasy free from models. Some of those, such as Ferdinand Cheval, in France, came from the working classes; others, like Antonio Gaudí, in Barcelona, or Antonio Virzi, in Rio de Janeiro, came from better educated social strata. Theirs is an architecture surrealistic, fantastic, unusual, organic, which have become an object of study and of growing interest.

For quite a few artists, architects and intellectuals well known in Brazil, the Casa da Flor is a most relevant cultural asset. Among others, these are some of the people who, on different occasions, have expressed their admiration: Alcides da Rocha Miranda, Ariano Suassuna, Carlos Scliar, Lélia Coelho Frota, Ítalo Campofiorito, Ferreira Gullar, Nise da Silveira, Carlos Byington, Zanine, Paulo Coelho and Afonso Romano de Santana, who wrote: "And there, for almost a century, lived a lonely black man, shaping stones into flowers. Uselessly. Playfully. Beautifully, with that purity to be found only in the truly enlightened... With his flowers of stone Seu Gabriel would invent Spring itself. The available Spring."

There is in the aesthetic object, according to Aristotle, "an element of contemplation, of satisfaction independent of any immediate need, a sensuous joy." Gabriel experienced that joy every late afternoon, as he came back home to rest: "At night I light the oil lamp, I sit down on this chair and, oh, how very happy I feel! As I look around and see everything in a silvery light it feels so gratifying... Every tiny shard transmuted into Beauty... I am the one who does it, I am the one who feels contented and comforted..."