Caldas José Zanine

Biography

Jose Zanine Caldas (1918 - ­2001) was born on the southern coast of Bahia. He was a self­taught artist, designer and architect, In the late 1930s (aged 20), Caldas started an architectural scale model workshop. During this phase of his career he worked with some of the major modernist architects active in Brazil at the time (such as Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa). A few years later Zanine started the "Z Artistic Furniture" line (Moveis Artisticos Z). He moved to Sao Paulo and expanded his resumé working as a scale modeler, furniture producer, and teacher at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Sao Paulo. In the 1970s Zanine traveled back to his home province of Bahia. Faced with the destruction of the Atlantic Forest, he started creating 'Protest Furniture' with wood reclaimed form the burnt forest. He started chiseling furniture directly from the huge logs of fallen trees and honed his signature style as a designer by creating organic, yet sculpturally brutalist pieces.