Goiânia
— — a city the country drew on a clean page.
Not only on a wall.
“Goiânia is one of the few capitals in the Americas drawn from scratch. In 1933 the state of Goiás moved its seat off the old colonial hill at Goiás Velho and laid out a new city on the open cerrado, in radiating avenues around a central square. The early buildings went up in tropical Art Deco — clean curves, pale stucco, ironwood louvres. The mango trees that line the avenues now were planted with the streets. The Bosque dos Buritis still holds a patch of native palm in the middle of downtown. — from the studio
Goiânia, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Goiânia is the capital of the state of Goiás, set on the cerrado plateau of central Brazil at around 750 metres elevation, about 200 kilometres southwest of Brasília. With roughly 1.5 million people in the city and 2.7 million in the metropolitan area, it is the second-largest urban area in Brazil's Central-West region after Brasília itself. The city was founded in 1933 and inaugurated as state capital in 1937, replacing the old colonial seat at Cidade de Goiás. It was designed by the architect Attílio Corrêa Lima on a radial plan inspired by Paris and Washington, and remains one of the earliest fully planned capitals of twentieth-century Latin America.
Goiânia's downtown is one of the largest concentrations of Art Deco architecture in South America. When the city was laid out in the 1930s its civic buildings — the Palácio das Esmeraldas (the governor's seat), the Teatro Goiânia, the old rail station at Praça do Trabalhador, the Grande Hotel — all went up in a stripped tropical Deco vocabulary of pale stucco, rounded corners, and shaded loggias suited to the cerrado climate. The Centro de Cultura e Convivência Atílio Corrêa Lima and the city's Bureau of Art Deco run guided walking circuits of about a dozen surviving buildings. The Cathedral of the Holy Family on Praça Dom Emanuel anchors the southern radial.
Goiânia sits in the cerrado — the vast tropical savanna that covers about a quarter of Brazil — and the climate runs on two clear seasons: a wet summer from October to April and a dry winter from May to September when humidity drops below 30 percent. The dry months bring brilliant flat light, jacaranda and ipê-amarelo bloom along the avenues, and the Bosque dos Buritis at the centre of downtown holds onto its native moriche palms by way of a spring-fed pond. The Parque Vaca Brava and the larger Parque Areião give the city a chain of green inside the radial plan.