Forjaz exhibition at Camões

An exhibition called ‘Projects on Paper – Unbuilt Works’ by architect José Manuel Forjaz and his team opens at the Camões Portuguese Cultural Center in Maputo on February 22, and will showcase forty unbuilt projects.Covering a 50-year time-frame, Projects on Paper begins with work conceived for the Agricultural Cooperative at Granja de Mourão (Alentejo, Portugal, 1961/62) and ends with the National Gallery of Arts (Maputo, 2015), revealing for the first time projects designed for various locations in countries from Mozambique to Portugal and from Angola to Japan, among others. The 40 projects are grouped into four themes: plans, squares and monuments; public equipment; residential architecture and competitions. “We have produced hundreds of projects and we have always tried to commit to them an equal degree of interest, effort, pains-taking and commitment. (…) As a whole [the unbuilt projects] represent a significant proportion of all the work done and, in many cases, have a unique and particular value in the sense that they reflect the search for new technical, spatial or formal solutions.“We believe that, by showing them, these projects can have some educational value in what they reflect and how they demonstrate the effort of a work team and a life dedicated to architecture.

”Projects on Paper is part of the ‘Thinking the City’ curatorial line developed by the Camões Portuguese Cultural Center in Maputo, where the exhibition ‘Oscilações’ by the Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura was presented in Maputo in September 2015 and, in November 2014, the photography exhibition ‘Interior Landscapes’ by Filipe Branquinho.In the year in which Maputo celebrates its 130th anniversary and the Eduardo Mondlane University’s Faculty of Architecture and Physical Planning its 30th, ‘Projectos em Papel’ is also an invitation to reflect on the space we live in and what we anticipate for the future, an open discussion on which is planned for March.The exhibition Projects on Paper has a Portuguese/English catalog with texts by João Paulo Borges Coelho and António Cabrita and graphic design by Anima Studio.The exhibition will be shown at the Camões Center in Maputo between February 22 and March 24. It will then move to the Camões Center Beira from April 26 to June 2. The exhibition is supported by BCI, Kioske Digital and Tropigália.