Julio Vilamajó Echaniz: a taste of Uruguayan modernism
Looking at the house that Uruguayan architect Julio Vilamajó Echaniz designed for his family in the country’s capital Montevideo, it’s hard to believe that it dates from 1930.
Blocky with asymmetric windows and a whole host of different levels, it’s geometric and strikingly contemporary – just as at home on the last series of Grand Designs as in South America 90 years ago. It’s brutal in form yes, but there are unexpected, almost humorous touches. Miniature ships’ bows jut out of the external wall, there’s a medusa head on guard and the underside of the overhanging roof is fitted with a pattern of colourful circles, like a game of drafts ready to be played. Its austereness is cut through by these playful details – a testament to the man behind it, who was an architect but also an illustrator, animator and sometimes jewellery maker.
It’s in this eccentric building, now the Casa Museo Vilamajó, that Uruguay-born designer Matteo Fogale undertook a residency last year to uncover forgotten histories from Vilamajó’s archive. As part of the project, he collaborated with seven Montevideo-based design studios to create new pieces inspired by the architect’s sketches. The results of this cross-century collaboration will be an exhibition, called Hilos Invisibles, which translates as ‘Invisible Threads’, due to open at London’s The Aram Gallery during London Design Festival in September.
‘Vilamajó can be considered the first modernist architect of South America,’ says Matteo Fogale, when we quizzed him about the architect’s importance to Uruguay. ‘In the 1920s he built more than twenty homes in the city of Montevideo and the meticulous attention he paid to detail in these houses was very unusual. His work is characterised by an eclectic style, using references to the past mixed with modern architectural concepts.’
Before he even got to peppering Montevideo with these unusual gems, Vilamajó was a star student, graduating from the Faculty of Architecture at just 20 years of age. It was a period when two very different approaches were colliding – the classical guidelines of the École des Beaux-Arts and the beginnings of modernism. Just a year after graduating Vilamajó decorated the auditorium of the Ateneo in Montevideo (with Horacio Azzarini), and refurbished José Enrique Rodó high school and several houses. He also received second prize in the competition for the headquarters of the Banco de la República Oriental del Uruguay and the Felipe Sanguinetti school building. A bit later Vilamajó was also a member of the Board of Design Consultants for the construction of the United Nations headquarters in New York with peers Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer.
From elaborate staircases to handles and bespoke furniture, Vilamajó was a stickler for detail. Fittingly then the pieces that will be exhibited as part of Hilos Invisibles have all been inspired by small elements from sketches found in Vilamajó’s archive – allowing designers Carolina Palombo Píriz, Claudio Sibille, CLARO, Menini-Nicola, Muar, Studio Diario and Rafael Antía to riff on his ideas but create all new products. The works, which range from concrete coffee tables inspired by a sketch of unknown function to an elm root dresser that nods to a 1944 commission Vilamajó undertook for La Americana Confectionary, celebrate Vilamajó’s legacy, but like the man himself, fuse history with innovation to create something entirely new.
If we’ve piqued your interest about groundbreaking exhibition Hilos Invisibles, read our Q&A with designer and curator Matteo Fogale here.
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