Jose Zanine Caldas

A self-taught artist, designer and architect, Jose Zanine Caldas (1918-2001) was born in Belmonte on the southern coast of Bahia. At age twenty, Zanine moved from his hometown to Rio to start an architectural scale model workshop. In this context he met and worked with some of the architects responsible for bringing Modernism toBrazil such as Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa.

In the early 1940s Zanine realized, through his model building work, that plywood -- then an innovation in the construction market -- lent itself perfectly to mass furniture production and, along with several partners, he started the "Z Artistic Furniture" line (Moveis Artisticos Z). In 1952 Zanine left the company because of internal conflictswith his partners.

Zanine moved to Sao Paulo and expanded his resumé working as a scale modeler, furniture producer, landscape designer and modeling teacher at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Sao Paulo. He caused a stir of controversy in the Brazilian design community by designing houses without an architecturedegree. Lucio Costa, among others, took up his cause and helped him obtain an honorary degree.

In the 1950s Zanine traveled back to his hometown and became inspired by the local craftsmen who carved canoes and rowboats from felled trees. He began to experiment with this more elemental approach of chiseling furniture directly from the huge logs and honed his signature style as a designer with these organic, sculptural pieces.

A life-long proponent of forest protection, Zanine attempted to plant a new tree every time a tree was taken down for one of his projects. His essays about Brazil's relationship to its forests draw upon architectural history since the Roman Empire, philosophy and folktales to present his passionate views on the power of solid wood as a material.

Zanine's work has been shown at the Louvre in Paris and at the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio and Sao Paulo.