Gustavo Medeiros (Anaya)

(b Cochabamba,16 Dec 1939). Bolivian architect and painter. He graduated from the Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad Nacional de C?rdoba, Argentina, in 1964 and taught in the architectural departments of the Universidad de Cochabamba (1964-9) and the Universidad de La Paz (1974-8). The most widely known architect of the 1970s and 1980s in Bolivia, Medeiros came to notice with his own late Modernist house, on 21st Street in the Calacoto zone of La Paz, in 1970. In the same year he began his major work, the Ciudad Universitaria de Oruro, in collaboration with Franklin Anaya (b 1924). On the highland to the north-west of Potos? and Sucre on an open site in view of the town of Oruro, he began to work out his ideas for an architecture that is authentic in its cultural and physical context. The buildings are mainly in exposed board-marked concrete and brickwork, and the design relies largely on standard single-storey units, square in plan, with tiled pitched roofs. One of the later buildings however, the Escuela de Metalurgia (1981), is contained in two linked, single-storey buildings, with pitched roofs spanning the long dimension of their rectangular plan forms. High and deep concrete-framed window embrasures, whose forms suggest Pre-Columbian inspiration, alternate with slender brick panels, the whole contributing to a rather unusual late Brutalist expression. His work in La Paz includes an urban development plan (1975-7), in collaboration with Teresa Gisbert, which proposes preservation and rehabilitation of the historic centre of the city, and private houses such as the Casa Buitrago (1982), a unique Post-modernist solution closely in context with its setting against the mountainside (see BOLIVIA, fig. 4). He regarded painting as parenthetic to his architecture but exhibited in America, Europe and Asia. He drew his initial inspiration from Pre-Columbian textiles and, at a later stage, portrayed rural groups, represented in the form of indigenous amulets.

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