— 12 NUNO PORTAS

“This is a collection of interviews by architect Nuno Lacerda Lopes. They are conversations between architects of the School of Oporto where the process of building an ideal of architecture, profession, society and school is sought, based on a personal and open reflection and even clarify the theoretical and practical concerns as well as the circumstances that underlie Portuguese architecture today”.

Excerpt

“- Good afternoon Professor Nuno Portas.

– Doctor no.

– Not a Doctor, but a Professor!

– I am a Professor without being an associate. I am a Full Professor without being a Doctor.

– Without being a Doctor!

– We were not Doctors.

– This is what I would like you to tell me a little bit about, about your education, about the time you were trained… Because the idea you have when you talk to yourself, when you also study your work and all your path, your life, is to be in the presence of the history of housing and Portuguese architecture itself, isn’t it?

– More or less. It is because it is already long.

– Or because it’s important, or because it’s…

– No. But, in fact, it was one of my beginnings, when I finished school in… You never really know when you finished school. At that stage there was no final exam, they were doing exams. But that’s not relevant. What is relevant, let’s say…

It was in the year 1955, more or less – 1956, 1957, around those years – I finished the course and had to prepare a thesis, which at that time was the final work. And I, together with other colleagues from Lisbon (like Pedro Vieira de Almeida, who is now a teacher here in Oporto) decided to do some theses, called theoretical, which the teacher – at that important time, who was Cristino da Silva, who was a great architect in his younger days, but who was already at the end of his academic life – together with others from the school, didn’t accept the theoretical theses. So we spoke with Professor Carlos Ramos and, therefore, I came to Oporto to do my thesis.

I came to do my thesis in Oporto, never having attended Oporto, the school in Oporto, the school of Fine Arts, and with exactly one thesis which was about the typology of collective housing. I think there’s still a copy somewhere. I don’t have one, but I think there is. It was once thought of republishing it, but that is a rather dated work, because it was intended to be a work of novelty at the time. There’s no point in publishing it now…”

— 11 RUI BRAZ AFONSO

“This is a collection of interviews by architect Nuno Lacerda Lopes. They are conversations between architects of the School of Oporto where the process of building an ideal of architecture, profession, society and school is sought, based on a personal and open reflection and even clarify the theoretical and practical concerns as well as the circumstances that underlie Portuguese architecture today”.

Excerpt

“Let’s talk with Rui Braz Afonso, born in Covilhã, Tortosendo, economist, professor Doctor in Italy, did his doctorate in Venice, dedicated to studies and research in territorial planning. With a large experience in urban planning, he worked and works in several master plans, town councils. He is a professor of Urban Economy, with more than 25 years of experience.

I would like to start by thanking you for the time yielded for the conversation and try to make a visit to these 25 years… What have changed in Portugal in terms of housing, society and the economy? Are different houses, different dwellings justified? What do you think?

First of all, I find these conversations interesting, they force us to reflect and it is always another occasion to take a small step forward.

I have a degree in Economics and entered the Faculty of Economics in 1969, at the height of the so-called Marcelist Spring. I entered exactly on top of the 1969 elections. It was an important moment for me, for my first reflections on what Portugal was like at that time. Then I entered the school at the beginning of 1978… 25 years have passed, and let’s say I came from SAAL (Serviço Ambulatório de Apoio Local), which was an important journey. Then I was here with some outings, with the idea that it’s very good here (in Portugal), but to understand that it’s good, one needs to go outside once in a while… In other words, it was fundamental for me, when in 1968 my father took me to Paris… Then I tried to do it with my children and I keep trying to do it.

Obviously I remember the conditions, even because I was very much requested to see it, a little because of the family environment. But I was very much solicited to see the unbelievable conditions in which all the living spaces were designed, for people who could not in any way interact with the project capacity. It was the minimum. Portugal has always lived within this minimum.

— NOVAS QUESTÕES SOBRE O ENSINO DA CONSTRUÇÃO

This book get to know the report, programme, contents and methods of theoretical and practical teaching of Construction Curriculum Unit 2 of the Integrated Master Course in Architecture, presented for access to the academic title of aggregate in the branch of knowledge of Architecture by the University of Oporto. It’s not a full version, as all the collection, research and comparison works sent to the annex are absent and this publication doesn’t include by merely editorial criteria, as well as it removes the detailed summary of the lesson and the other documents required for the exam, focusing only on the items addressed to the teaching/learning issues of a Curricular Unit at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Oporto.

The research that is published in this text, rather than trying to achieve an exclusive vision about the construction of a Curriculum Unit in a duly consolidated Integrated Master of Architecture as is the FAUP, intends to explore some scientific issues on the subject, address other pedagogical perspectives and discuss the complex relationships between practice and teaching of Architecture. In a world in permanent and rapid mutation, where the problems of Construction, Project and its Teaching/Learning are more and more interdisciplinary, the demand for new and competitive abilities to the new architect to understand, act and build in the complex world where we live is evident.

— FROM THINKING TO BUILDING

“This book arises from the collection of a series of texts that were published in some furniture, architecture and scenography books, works that we have doing in recent years.

More than an organized reflection or a quest for a systematization, we prefer to present some of the texts that may indicate or contextualize a whole production or creation that intercepts different fields of project that are now in contemporary society presented to the architect.

So we’ll talk about representation, design, process and research: about an idea construction and from where ideas pop up; similarities and differences between the different disciplines, architecture and theater; the resemblance between the scholar space and the house where we live in; the places we attend and as these spaces affect and influence us; about materials and construction process, us and others; all that matters in attempting to make architecture, in attempting to organize a living space.

But we also talk about time and different times, that help us understanding the time we live in and that we build, the ideal of happiness and persistence, a willingness to build and desire. Emotions and experiences, ways of seeing the world and building it. So the title: “From thinking to building”, because is in building that we feel accomplished.”

— HABITAR A CENA

“Throughout the work, it will be studied general problems concerning space (the architect’s preferred field of work), its organisation, its representation and meaning, where man relates, perceives and realizes his existence.

Far from considering architecture as a system of a technical nature, but increasingly as a manifestation and response of man’s desires and feelings, an attempt is being made to apprehend man’s relationships and perceptive capacities in the use of space.

At the same time, it is not our purpose to give effective or definitive answers to the problems raised, but only to problematize the strict relationship between man’s living space and the spatiality that human life structures, articulated with time and the historical moment that gives it form.

We have no doubt that this proposed approach contains a certain amount of excess; however, because we consider this to be only a first step, we dare to take it, because it shows us the greatest interest in the experience of academic and professional life.

In short, it is the following question, often antithetical in terms of architecture, that we will try to provide some fragments of a reflection: the space to be seen (published) or to be lived?

— SOCORRO, ACABEI O CURSO

“This work could have many titles and above all different approach strategies, but it could only have one intention, which is to try to help young graduates, now masters from our schools, to start their professional careers successfully.

How to start and what to do in order to make a living from their courses, without great drama and trying to simplify their lives in an era where it is not easy to find work, where there is a very large supply of increasingly qualified professionals and especially when schools, colleges do not teach us what to do in order to be professionals, in other words, to live off what we “graduate” and to which we dedicate a large part of our life time, is what we will deal with here”.

— 10 SÉRGIO FERNANDEZ

“This is a collection of interviews by architect Nuno Lacerda Lopes. They are conversations between architects of the School of Oporto where the process of building an ideal of architecture, profession, society and school is sought, based on a personal and open reflection and even clarify the theoretical and practical concerns as well as the circumstances that underlie Portuguese architecture today”.

Excerpt

“Good morning, Architect Sérgio Fernandez, lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Oporto and now also at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Minho. I would like to thank you in advance for this interview, an architect with remarkable experience in the field, both in teaching, in one way, and also in terms of collective housing projects, in which I would like to highlight the Pasteleira building, in co-authorship with Architect Pedro Ramalho, his collaboration with SAAL, and also his house in Caminha, which we can quickly highlight among other works of great quality that we will talk about here. I would like to start by asking you, how was your education, what was that period like when you finished the course and how and when you started working?

As far as my education is concerned, I took the course still at the School of Fine Arts in Oporto and still in a regime that was the reform of 36, in the end, I had a course that was guided by 4 years, called special course and then whoever had more than fourteen of average proceeded to the higher course and completed the course, so it was 6 years more internship, as it’s done now, and final exam, which at the time was called thesis.

The school represented a centre of modernity, though with many exceptions, because it was led by Professor Carlos Ramos, who was in fact a very airy, very civilised man and a man of direct influences, not so much from the Bauhaus but from the Gropius.  Therefore, a man betting on the modernity that he had – previous to my entrance, more or less a short time before – had mobilized a series of new people with assistants, of which Távora, Filgueiras, and later Arnaldo Araújo, Loureiro stood out, representing a certain breath of fresh air in the school, where there was still a series of very retrograde people, although people with value, such as Rogério Azevedo, who was my professor.

Rogério Azevedo was a man with a lot of culture, I have no doubt about that, he was really interesting in the conversations he made, and he practically only made conversations; he often wondered in the class what year he was teaching? He didn’t know, he didn’t know and didn’t care.

He was a very cultured and very interesting man, but very reactionary and anything that smelled vaguely of progressive architecture, he would react. Which is strange, because he is a man who made the Oporto Garage of Commerce, but then made all that journey that we all know. So there was a mixture at school, of a certain weight of tradition, and then a new people who were really betting on… and who were the most important at school. I remember perfectly of Loureiro, of Távora that had a great influence and Filgueiras too, and the director Carlos Ramos himself.

I made the school in that mixture, in that more or less complex path and where there were no longer those barriers that had characterized the first struggle for contemporary architecture, modern architecture in Portugal. We had magazines, we already had a series of accesses to things that were done outside. But in spite of everything, what the school was – now I think there’s a very profound change – was theoretically very empty. We had a formation that was very formalist, I remember for example, that the representations in the work deliveries, the walls were not thick, it was not worthwhile, it was only indicating the division from one place to another; it was very formalist, the construction problems were very careless, by the way, I had Rogério de Azevedo as construction teacher, who was a little oblivious to almost everything and so it was a formation quite distant from the real one.

This then began to take on another character, from the publication of the survey and from a certain interest which aroused in the class of professionals and in the school as well, a kind of discovery, authenticity of popular architecture, of country architecture, etc. It was also a form of mystification but, in spite of everything, it changed the state of things a little, and we, as students, and also with the help of the professors, obviously began to take a little more interest in reality, so much so, that much later came the 25th of April, the school was all directly connected to the outside and it was very easy that connection. During our time this was not that much, what happened was a period, in fact, of dazzling discovery of architecture, of authentic roots, etc. This led many people, including me, to do research in the field and my thesis work – it was called thesis although I don’t think it could be called that, it was a work to obtain a degree – it was done in Rio de Onor, I lived there for a year, in a completely lost village, not even had a road. It was a very rich year for many different reasons, fundamentally at the level of the personal relationships that were established and the actual discoveries of the conditions in which people lived, it was a village that had no electricity, that really opened my eyes to many things that we did not know, but on the other hand there was that myth that everything from the countryside was good and authentic and what was from the city was bad, which was not true either, so I made the school in that balance between a great deal of abstraction, but already affiliated in everything that was modern, in the Corbusiers, in the Gropius, etc. ”

— 09 FRANCISCO BARATA

“This is a collection of interviews by architect Nuno Lacerda Lopes. They are conversations between architects of the School of Oporto where the process of building an ideal of architecture, profession, society and school is sought, based on a personal and open reflection and even clarify the theoretical and practical concerns as well as the circumstances that underlie Portuguese architecture today”.

Excerpt

“Good morning Francisco Barata, architect and professor with a wide experience in the various areas of architecture, teaching and design. Francisco Barata, was my professor in the second year of my course at this school, then School of Fine Arts of Oporto, the ESBAP. He has a very particular and interesting work, highlighting the collaboration with other architects. He was able to build a very diverse work, not only in terms of collective housing, but also with remarkable examples in the recovery and rehabilitation of buildings, design and intervention in the city, and the study and development of research work. In 1985, in Italy, he carried out research on the historical centres of contemporary cities and, in Oporto, he presented the thesis “Transformation and permanence in the housing of Oporto – the forms of the naforma house of the city” in 1996.

In this conversation, which I would like to thank in advance, I would like to focus essentially on your experience as an architect linked to collective housing, but also on the study and research you have carried out and been developing on this subject. In a more specific way, I would like to approach and discuss the project of the Massarelos housing block that you designed with Manuel Fernandes de Sá.

I would start by asking you what your education was like? When did you finish the course? How was the period of adaptation to the profession? And, in that return, how was your training time and the beginning of your professional activity?

It has been many years. I was already working in the studio of the architect Távora since half of the course. Unless I was mistaken, in the third year I went to work for the studio of the architect Távora who had a very important role in my training, in how to face the project, in how to face the architect’s own activity.

The training at the school was very particular. The period I spent there, from 69/70 to 75, was a period of successive pedagogical experiences, very rich on many aspects of learning, but with great gaps in other aspects, for example, in drawing. Just the other day I was thinking that the architects of my generation are those who never had drawing in the first two years; neither did they have the conventional drawing that was taught at school based on statue drawing. I would even say that we took a course without Drawing discipline. Therefore, all the drawing that was produced was always on project. As even the development of the project itself was experimental in pedagogical terms, we too, over the six years of the course, had a very unusual project process in relation to what developed later in the year after mine”.

— 08 BERNARDO FERRÃO

“This is a collection of interviews by architect Nuno Lacerda Lopes. They are conversations between architects of the School of Oporto where the process of building an ideal of architecture, profession, society and school is sought, based on a personal and open reflection and even clarify the theoretical and practical concerns as well as the circumstances that underlie Portuguese architecture today”.

Excerpt

“Good afternoon Architect Bernardo Ferrão, thank you very much for disposing your precious time, I would like to ask you a first question, which has to do with your education. Basically tring to understand a little bit of what was your first or your great influences? When did you take your architecture course, when did you finish it? and when did you start to get in touch with professional reality.

I started working, when I finished the course, with the Architect Fernando Távora and in a way that was my first influence. Through his concerns and the books they used at that time in his office – some concerns started to show, on the other hand, my own training and my own curiosity also threw me to other somewhat alternative paths, especially in the first years of my life, namely people connected fundamentally with the English and the Italians, people connected with English brutalism.

It has something to do with this context of collective housing, because we have to see that, finally, at that time there was a cut in the CIAM (international congress of modern architecture); that old theory of the type of housing that led to the French HLM began to be challenged and new perspectives began to emerge that were fundamentally led by a group called Team X (J. Bakema, G. Candilis, Aldo van Eyck, Giancarlo De Carlo, Alison and Peter Smithson and Shadrach Woods) who, by chance, make a manifesto beginning to question certain aspects of architecture, specifically collective housing and how collective housing should fit into the city. This has reflexes in England, it has reflexes in Holland, it has reflexes in Italy, France perhaps, but in France architecture was always “ugly” and with a bad taste – boring”.

— 07 FERNANDO TÁVORA

“This is a collection of interviews by architect Nuno Lacerda Lopes. They are conversations between architects of the School of Oporto where the process of building an ideal of architecture, profession, society and school is sought, based on a personal and open reflection and even clarify the theoretical and practical concerns as well as the circumstances that underlie Portuguese architecture today”.

Excerpt

“Good morning, architect Fernando Távora. I would like to start by thanking you for spending this precious time of your life for this interview. I think that, given the work that you have and with everything that you have already done throughout your life, you dispense with any presentation. So I would go straight to our subject and start by asking you, what was your education and how was your evolution process as an architect, throughout this very busy and successful career?

Well, I can’t say I’m at the end of my life, because people get very sad when I say that (which is a sign that they are my friends). But there is no doubt that lately I have been thinking very precisely about my education.

When I wanted to be an architect, my father thought it was worse than being a bricklayer. Because he had an engineer son, who was considered to be the best in architecture and engineering. And that he was, by the way, an engineer and also an architect (although he didn’t practice as an architect). The truth is that my father had this notion that the architect is an old man, a man who makes some drawings, some things and such, but who doesn’t make a scientific application, just like the engineer does. The engineer in my house was a kind of revolution – Bernardo, my older brother.

That shook me a bit. And it shook me because I could enter the School [of Fine Arts] with the fifth year of high school. The course was not a college course, we entered with the fifth year. And, as a consequence, I said to my father: “I will do the following: I will do the sixth and the seventh, and then I will take the three subjects, for the three professions”, which were: civil engineer, architect and also another profession which was the military life. The truth is that at the time I did the three chairs plus the two years of high school and earned a lot. And I went to school.

One thing that matters in my education is the pre-education. For example, that problem you raised earlier (before the interview) about Raúl Lino: my father was a great admirer of Raúl Lino. He was a very nationalistic man and thought that Raúl Lino fulfilled the Portuguese dream of architecture. He made a so-called Portuguese architecture. And so, Raúl Lino was a dream of my father. I remember that my brother Bernardo, as an engineer, did a work, a project for Architecture (a subject that he had in the Faculty of Engineering). He made a house over the Douro that was inspired by a work of Raúl Lino. He had a book of Raúl Lino, which had been given by my father. He had told him: “for my dear son Bernardo, that he always follows the great master”. Therefore, there was this mental concern of the “Portuguese house”