Anthony Almeida (b. 1921 in Dar es Salaam) is a Tanzanian architect who has produced numerous remarkable buildings over the past fifty years.
Almeida was educated in Bombay and graduated as an architect in 1948 at the JJ School of Architecture. His studies were hindered by the civil disobedience campaign during the struggle for independence. One of the projects he worked on in India was a ‘pandal’, the temporary bamboo structure, 158.5 metres in diameter, which housed the first post-independence Congress Party meeting.
Anthony Almeida (b. 1921 in Dar es Salaam) is a Tanzanian architect who has produced numerous remarkable buildings over the past fifty years.
Almeida was educated in Bombay and graduated as an architect in 1948 at the JJ School of Architecture. His studies were hindered by the civil disobedience campaign during the struggle for independence. One of the projects he worked on in India was a ‘pandal’, the temporary bamboo structure, 158.5 metres in diameter, which housed the first post-independence Congress Party meeting.
Upon the death of his father in 1948, he had to return to Dar es Salaam to take charge of the family trading firm and coconut plantation. Instead, he decided to work as an architect.
At that period there were only two architects’ practices in Tanzania; these were branch offices of British firms. For Almeida, the very first Tanzanian architecture graduate, there was no room in these practices and he had to accept a position as a designer in an engineering firm.
However, only two years after his return to Dar es Salaam, Almeida succeeded in establishing his own architectural practice, the first locally owned and run, RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) registered firm of architects in Tanzania. In the initial years he had a tough struggle to get acceptance that an indigenous architect could be capable of succeeding in the architectural profession.
However, not only was Almeida the first Tanzanian architect, he was also one of the first to introduce modernist architecture to the then Tanganyika Protectorate.
Public, administrative and residential buildings in Dar es Salaam in the ‘forties and ‘fifties were still built in the typical colonial architecture, with Mangalore-tiled, hipped roofs with wide eaves, verandas, whitewashed walls and dark stained timber casement windows. Buildings developed by the Indian, middle class, trading community were in plastered tropical art-deco style and the indigenous Tanzanians built in wattle-and-daub and corrugated iron sheets.
In this environment, Almeida’s buildings with their flat roofs, fresh-coloured concrete structures and steel casement windows were a novel sight. When he presented his designs for the St Xavier’s Primary School (1954) to the Director of Education for approval, this colonial officer remarked “Well, well, what have we here – an aeroplane?”
However, from this period onwards Almeida succeeded in convincing his clients and the administration of the value of his approach and the quality of his work. It was during these last seven years of colonial rule and the first fifteen years of independence that Almeida realised an impressive number of high quality and high profile projects such as the Goan Institute (1958), the Almeida Residence (1962), the Central Library (1968), the NIC Headquarters (1970) and the Dar es Salaam Magistrate’s Courts (1972).
All these buildings demonstrated Almeida’s capacity to produce personalised and contextual work in modernist architecture. The Joint Christian Chapel (1975) at the University of Dar es Salaam can be seen as an important turning point in Almeida’s career. This remarkable sculptural building with its daring, floating concrete roof marks the balanced synthesis of Almeida’s involvement in the development of modernist architecture with the contemporary ‘brutalist structuralism’ and his attachment to the local cultural and climatic context.
After the Joint Christian Chapel, Almeida designed in a more historically inspired fashion that seems to diverge from the Modernist tradition. However, up to and including his recent work, his buildings show his mastery of functionally and climatically optimal layout and careful detailing. Although he turned to a more vernacular expression in his buildings from the early ‘nineties onwards, his belief in modernist design philosophy and principles has remained unabated.
Apart from his architectural activities, Anthony Almeida has been active on other fronts. Since his educational period in India he has produced cartoons for various newspapers showing his particular views on developments in India, Tanzania and the rest of the world. He has won several prizes as a photographer.
He is still active as an architect and still produces cartoons and fearlessly debates developments in urban landscape and architectural heritage.
