Jayme
Fonseca Rodrigues

Jayme Campello Fonseca Rodrigues attended the Architecture course at the Mackenzie Engineering School in São Paulo at the same time when Oswaldo Bratke – who was his classmate – and Eduardo Kneese de Mello and Henrique Mindlin were also studying there.

During his brief career, he worked in urbanization and social housing projects for the IAPC and IAPETC institutes, as well as for their headquarters in the city of São Paulo. His work also included landscaping, apartment buildings and houses, hospitals, and interior architecture. In a partnership with Rino Levi, he ran what was maybe the largest architectural design office in São Paulo at the time.

His Sobre as Ondas (Over the Waves) building, in the coastal town of Guarujá, seemed to suggest new bearings for the architect, with lines that hinted at transatlantic steamers and an art deco look. His designs alluded to the works of Rob Mallet-Stevens, Pierre Patout, Michel Roux-Spitz, Bruno Elkouken, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Jules Leleu and Ivan da Silva Bruhns. A pioneer, from early on he was interested in, and worked with, interior architecture and furniture design, in line with the most refined work being done in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States and Europe.