Biography of Diógenes Rebouças

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Biografia de Diógenes Rebouças
Biography of Diógenes Rebouças

Diógenes Rebouças was arguably the most renowned and influential Bahian architect between the late 1940s and the early 1960s.

Teacher, artist and great thinker, he played a fundamental role in the construction of the landscape of Salvador and other Bahian cities and in the formation of new generations of architects and urban planners. Protagonist of modern architecture and urbanism in Bahia, Diógenes Rebouças is responsible for emblematic projects such as the old Fonte Nova, the Hotel da Bahia, the Park School and the Faculty of Architecture of UFBA.

Biography of Diógenes Rebouças

Diógenes de Almeida Rebouças (Diógenes Rebouças) was born in 1914 on a farm in the Bahia municipality of Amargosa and, at the age of four, moved with his family to Itabuna, where his parents owned rural properties.

Between 1930 and 1933, he studied Agronomic Engineering at the Agricultural School of Bahia, in São Bento das Lajes, and then returned to Itabuna, where he began working as a topographer, while helping to manage the family farms.

Obras de Diógenes Rebouças

Through the social contacts and engineers he met as a topographer in Itabuna, he started to elaborate architectural projects, becoming one of the most productive designers in the city in the 30s.

His most important project of this first phase is the Cathedral of São José, in Itabuna. In 1936, Diógenes Rebouças moved permanently to Salvador, where he resumed his courses in architecture, drawing and painting at the Bahia School of Fine Arts, which he had begun five years earlier; in 1937, he completed only the Drawing and Painting course.

In 1941, he was invited by the engineer Mário Leal Ferreira to give his opinion on the landscaping of the area around the stadium that was being built by the State Government near the Dique do Tororó.

Angered by the project, which blocked the bottom of the valley, he presented an alternative study for the stadium, implanting it partially on the slope of Nazaré and creating an opening to the Dique do Tororó, and managed to convince Governor Landulfo Alves to implement his proposal.

The Fonte Nova stadium would be inaugurated ten years later. From 1943, with the installation of the EPUCS (Office of the Urban Planning Plan of the City of Salvador) under the general direction of Ferreira, Rebouças was invited to coordinate the landscape sector.

With Ferreira’s death in 1947, Rebouças took over the direction of EPUCS, where he developed, over the next four years, urban and architectural projects that changed the landscape of Salvador, including Avenida Centenário, the State Penitentiary, the Hotel da Bahia (in partnership with Paulo Antunes Ribeiro), the new pavilions of the Santa Terezinha Sanatorial Park and the Fish Market in Porto da Barra.

He also designed projects for the interior of the state, such as the hospital and hotel in Paulo Afonso and a series of school buildings based on the pedagogy of Anísio Teixeira, which were built in several Bahian cities.

The production of this period has its culmination in the Carneiro Ribeiro Educational Center in Salvador, formed by a Park School and four Class-Schools and which immediately becomes a national and international reference of school architecture, serving as a model even today for similar projects in other Brazilian cities.

Only in 1952, when he was already arguably the most renowned architect in Bahia and had already left EPUCS, did Rebouças obtain the title of architect from the Federal University of Bahia, where he began to teach; at the same time, he opened his architecture and urban planning office, which would be, until the middle of the following decade, the largest and most productive in the state.

Among the main projects of this phase are the Avenida Contorno, the Educational Center of the State of Alagoas, the headquarters of TV Itapoã, the Polytechnic School, the SESC Summer Camp, the Sete Portas Bus Station, the Maritime Passenger Station and the BANEB headquarters, as well as dozens of residences and apartment and office buildings. Although he had partners such as Bina Fonyat and Fernando Leal on some of these projects, it was the young Assis Reis who became his main collaborator during this phase.

Assis’s departure from the office in 1963 initiated a new stage in Rebouças’s production, in which the number of projects was smaller, but his influence remained unmatched. The most representative projects of the following ten years are the Faculty of Architecture of UFBA and the expansion of the Fonte Nova Sports Complex in Salvador, as well as industrial, office and apartment buildings.

In 1972, he closed his office for good and began a period dedicated to teaching, participation in bodies such as the State Council for Culture and consultancy. In the 1980s, as a consultant for IPHAN, he developed dozens of studies for listed monuments in Bahia.

At the same time, he designed a mass transportation project for the central area of Salvador, which was not implemented, and had the opportunity to design, in co-authorship with Lourenço do Prado Valladares, the proposal for the renovation and expansion of the Hotel da Bahia.

In 1984 he retired compulsorily from UFBA and, in December 1994, he died at his home. Diógenes Rebouças was arguably the most renowned and influential Bahian architect between the late 1940s and early 1960s and, even after this period, played a key role in the construction of the landscape of Salvador and other Bahian cities and in the formation of new generations of architects and urban planners.

Diógenes Rebouças’ canvases “Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos in the 19th Century”

Seeking to rescue the image of the city, from the pre-reform period, the architect and artist Diógenes Rebouças, who died a few years ago, based on photographs, drawings, sketches and testimonies, recreated, in painted canvases, the main places of Salvador, severely affected or totally lost by the reforms and, still, of other places, today emblematic of the city, such as the Farol da Barra, then sparsely or not occupied by urbanization.

Some of these canvases are included in the publication “Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos no Século XIX”, by the author of the canvases.

Biography of Diógenes Rebouças

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