José Zanine Caldas (Belmonte, BA), April 25th, 1919 — Vitória-ES, December 20th, 2001 was a landscaper, model maker, sculptor, furniture maker and self-taught architect, besides working as a teacher in Brazil and abroad. Due to an unusual talent, he was recognized as Master of Wood. His work promoted the integration of traditional brazilian crafts and modernism in a unique way.

Biography

José Zanine Caldas, or simply Zanine, a bahian, was born in Belmonte in 1919. Ever since he was a child, he was fond of constructions and sawmills. Son of a doctor, at the age of 13 he started making his neighbors Christmas nativity scenes using his father’s syringe boxes, made from cardboard paper. Later on he had drawing classes with a private teacher and, at the age of eighteen, went to São Paulo to work as a draftsperson at Severo & Villares. Around 1941, he created the Maquete Studio workshop, in Rio de Janeiro. From Zanine’s workshop came prototypes of projects signed by names such as Lúcio Costa, Oswaldo Arthur Bratke and Oscar Niemeyer, great brazilian architects of the 20th century. From the craft of creating scale models came the knowledge, from his love for nature, and especially for wood, came works of architecture, sculptures and furniture that are inimitable until today. In the 50s and 60s, he introduced his popular line of marine-grade plywood to the real estate market, known as “Z Artistic Furniture”.

In the early 60s, he became responsible for the scale model sector of the architecture course at the University of Brasília, the city where he designed and built his first houses, already making abundant use of wood.

At the end of the 60s, he built dozens of houses in an unexplored region of Rio de Janeiro, which later became a neighborhood that is now one of the most valued areas in the city.

From 1968 onwards, he used roots from trees destroyed by deforestation for chairs, tables, benches and armchairs. He was a pioneer in terms of sustainability.

In 1980 he founded the Wood Applications Development Center (WAD), a core center that aimed at encouraging research on the use of Brazilian wood in civil construction. Its main objective was to prevent the increasing destruction of forests in the country.

Without ever having attended any Architecture college, Zanine was a precursor of an architectural style integrated with Brazil’s nature and climate, and recognized by the greatest and most important architects as the most Brazilian of architects.

The French recognized his talent even before Brazil. In 1990, he was invited to take part in the d’Automne Festival in Paris, with a solo exhibition at the Louvre’s Musée d’Arts Décoratifs, called “Zanine, L’architecte et la forêt” (Zanine, the architect and the forest). Simultaneously there was a Picasso exhibition and, to the surprise of many, Zanine’s exhibition had a bigger audience than the renowned painter’s.

In 1991 he received the Médaille d’argent de l’Architecture from the Academie d’Architecture in Paris. In 1991, in Brazil, he was finally honored and recognized as an architect at the XIII Brazilian Architects Congress.