Patrícia and Renato

After meeting Patrícia Naves in New York during ICFF, I decided Belo Horizonte had to be a stop in my itinerary. After 4 days and also thanks to her, BH became my favorite Brazilian city – even if Rio would win the “where would I live were I to move to Brazil?” contest.

Patrícia and I we were introduced in New York by Zoë Melo, a fellow “mineira” (native of the state of Minas Gerais), as some of Patrícia’s designs are part of Zoë’s Touch collection and were shown at Destination Brazil, a Brazilian product design showcase that took place at the MoMA SoHo store in May of 2009.

Trained as an architect, Patrícia has her own product label, Oiti, and runs her own design store in Belo Horizonte, Grampo. She also designs accessories for fashion designer Ronaldo Fraga, a celebrated mineiro who has been taking the Brazilian fashion world by storm with his intricate, sometimes surreal fashion collections that establish dialogues between Brazilian culture and the contemporary world and are inspired by such disparate things as Disneyland or Santos Dumont (Brazil’s air travel pioneer).

I flew in from São Paulo on a Friday afternoon; Patrícia was going to leave town with her boyfriend Renato the next day for the weekend (she would also later go to Copenhagen for designboom’s designmart), so we planned to meet for dinner with some of their friends, which was a lot of fun.

Raquel, Alexandre and I

One of Patrícia’s friends I ended up spending a lot of time talking to, Alexandre Mancini, is an artist who works in the tile panel medium. He is also truly passionate about the history of tiles and tile panels, particularly the fascinating history that connects Portuguese and Brazilian tile panels and the many, virtually unknown influences between the two since the 16th century. Tile panels have been an important part of Brazil’s architecture from Baroque churches (excluding the ones in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais’ World Heritage town, which are tile-less – for a reason) to modern buildings in Brasília. Alexandre told me about Athos Bulcão, the celebrated artist who worked with Niemeyer on many of his buildings and developed a unique way of designing and building his abstract tile panels by creating modules that would later be randomly applied by workers on site. Alexandre speaks passionately about Bulcão, whom he sees as his main inspiration; the panels he’s designed for buildings by his architects and friends Carlos Alberto Maciel, Alexandre Brasil, Bruno Santa Cecília and André Luiz Prado (who also publish an architecture magazine, MDC) reflect that influence.

Together with Alexandre’s girlfriend, Raquel (who is a direct descendent of the Távoras, Portugal’s powerful and infamous aristocratic family) we talked about what is was like to live and work in Belo Horizonte and the culture of being “mineiro” – from the food to Guimarães Rosa, one of Brazil’s great modern writers. It was great to spend an evening with people so proud, but also actively involved, in the life, history and heritage of where they’re from.

Tatiana Sperhacke and her husband Raul Krebs picked me up at the Porto Alegre airport this morning, and we went straight to the Fundação Iberê Camargo for lunch. Álvaro Siza’s only second (thanks Paulo Moreira for the correction!) building in South America is a true architectural gem – despite the silly toilet symbols his clients still let him get away with. Walking along its narrow corridors and spacious halls on a sunny, crisp day like today made the experience even grander.

Tatiana (found the photo above, with me and Raul are reflected on the museum’s glass front) is a graphic and product designer, SVA – MFA Designer as author – alumna an a true “gaúcha”. Over lunch and later in her studio we talked about her work in New York and in Porto Alegre, teaching, her own 2D and 3D designs, collective workspaces, references…

In between we came to Heloísa Crocco’s “wooden box” studio on the outskirts of Porto Alegre by the Guaíba river, where I left my suitcase and we had Guaraná with Heloísa. I’m now back here, it’s about 10ºc/50ºF and I can see the lights on the other side of the river from the balcony windows – this i a truly special place run by a very special person. Tomorrow morning the three of us are leaving for Bento Gonçalves for the first day of Casa Brasil Design.

Thank you Zoë Melo for introducing me to Tatiana (and also to Rodrigo Almeida, and to other people I will meet along the way…) and to Adélia Borges for calling Heloísa right on time.