Jayme C. Fonseca Rodrigues (1905-1946)

Jayme Campello Fonseca Rodrigues (1905-1946) was a classmate of Oswaldo Bratke, a contemporary of Eduardo Kneese de Mello and Henrique Mindlin in the Architecture course of Mackenzie Engineering School.
Up until 1946 he had done urbanization and social housing projects for IAPC and IAPETC as well as their headquarters in the city of São Paulo; developed landscaping proposals, apartment buildings and houses, hospitals, and done interior architecture. He had a more extensive technical collection than his colleagues at the time. He probably ran, alongside Rino Levi, one of the largest (if not the largest) architectural design offices in São Paulo. He is known as having the prestige for being the founder and first vice-president of IAB/SP.
His death at age 41 interrupted a career on the rise. His swan song was the building Sobre as Ondas (Over the Waves) in Guarujá, today recognized as cultural heritage. This building seemed to point to new directions for an architect whose drawings alluded to the aesthetics of ocean Streamliners in the taste of Art Deco. He was a designer who dialoged with Rob Mallet-Stevens, Pierre Patout, Michel Roux-Spitz, Bruno Elkouken, J.-E. Ruhlmann, J.-E. Leleu, and Ivan da Silva Bruhns. Anticipating many of his colleagues, from early on he devoted himself to interior architecture and furniture design in line with what was being refined in the United States and Europe in the years 1930/40.
His premature death also caused him to disappear from the History of Architecture and Design. This small sample is the beginning of a redemption of a work and a person who was a turning point in São Paulo and Brazilian architecture. - Hugo Segawa