Signs from Romeo de Paoli’s hotel projects

Abstract

Romeo de Paoli was born into a family of Italian builders in the recently inaugurated city of Belo Horizonte. He graduated in Engineering and also worked professionally as an architect, builder, visual artist and entrepreneur. He was one of the most important figures in the city’s civil construction industry in the first half of the 20th century. Among the thirteen projects approved by the city hall in the 1930s for hotel use in the central area, six were designed by his office. This article explores a brief moment in his career, a gap between the approval of three of these buildings, which still retain their original signs: Imperial Palace (1934), Piraquara (1935), and Cláudio Manoel (1939). Often ignored even by heritage protection agencies, these graphic artifacts are part of Belo Horizonte’s typographic landscape. Recording and collecting data such as the building’s identity (image, name, address, original use, current use, location, architect’s name and date of construction), data on the nominative architectural typography, with photos, specifications on the typeface, composition and materials used, are premises of the investigation and tools for cataloging the Belo Horizonte’s graphic memory.