— 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.

— 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”

— 06 TERESA FONSECA

“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 Professor, Doctor, Architect…

Architect. The ideal is professor Teresa Fonseca, or Teresa Fonseca, because I don’t think we live with the titles. What matters are the degrees we correspond to and I like the name degrees, that is to correct a little bit, sometimes, the way we treat each other. I think that degrees are steps up with sacrifice in the sense of one’s own education, although in Portugal there is a tendency to confuse this with honorary or power degrees. If this translated in practice into scientific power, scientific power and authority or professional authority, it would be great, because it was once again the exercise of service authority; only in Portugal this is not recognised. Anyone who is elected, or who is appointed to anything, doesn’t understand that as a service to be provided, but understands it as a place of exercise of power and importance. I have great difficulties in adjusting to Portuguese society; I have always had great difficulties in adjusting, also because I am the most maladjusted person for the exercise of power. I refuse, I don’t know, I don’t have degrees for the exercise of power at management level, for example, but I feel I have interesting professional qualifications. I feel that I have done a lot of study, since I was very young I have always loved studying and I think that it is becoming more and more necessary for me to learn something more. For example, on your subject: housing”.

— 05 PEDRO RAMALHO

“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

“Architect and Professor Pedro Ramalho, professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Oporto, one of the most renowned Portuguese architects, with remarkable experience in the field of public facilities and collective housing, among other works that he has carried out over several decades of professional practice and has contributed with great works to our best national architecture.

There are several remarkable buildings, from the Pasteleira Block, the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Oporto, the Cooperative of Sete Bicas, the set for the INH in Guimarães (among others), as well as its numerous single-family dwellings that it has designed. There are so many works, that it would not be easy to list them all. But, in any case, I would like you to tell me about your experience, this long academic and professional experience, and to revisit your dwellings, your way of understanding housing.

I would like to start by asking you, what was your education? What was your education like? What were your influences? What was the reality in Portugal? How does an architect start working?

Well, I entered the School of Fine Arts (save error in 1955) with much joy and enthusiasm. There was an authoritarian and retrograde regime in which teaching was ideologically controlled. The high school was not (at all) a nice house and when I finally entered the Fine Arts I passed to a completely different world. The relationship between teachers and students was something that seemed truly exceptional.

When I entered the school, the “old retirement”, which I attended during one school year, was still in force. Then, when the reform of 57 started, by advice of Master Carlos Ramos, I went back; it was a year that was lost, but a great hope was placed in the reform of the teaching of architecture, namely the updating of its programs. It was a difficult decision, but one that I took with enthusiasm.

Undoubtedly, the “new reform” brought a new credibility to the architecture course in pedagogical terms. Subjects which did not exist before were introduced, linked to technology but also to the reformulation of the Theory and History of Architecture.

What I think was profoundly negative was the two propaedeutic years at the Faculty of Science. At that time all university courses in science were obliged to attend, which was nothing more than a “filter” in the difficult access to higher education.

In the course of architecture it was profoundly negative and dramatic, they were real “lead” years. It was a disaster that took 10 years to repair.

For my part, the invitation that Otávio Filgueiras made to me, at the end of 57, to join the office (which I was setting up at the time with Soutinho), allowed me to do what I was really excited about. I was only enrolled for one year in the General Physics Course of the Faculty of Sciences, without going to school, but I worked in architecture (as a draftsman).

When I returned to the School I was more prepared than my colleagues which allowed me to finish the course with some ease.

I can conclude that my training between the School and the atelier, as was normal among architecture students, was good and allowed me to enter the liberal profession earlier.

When I arrived at the School (we are talking about the end of the 50’s) the architectural standards had as reference Le Corbusier and the architects of the Modern Movement. It was the rationalist school, where I pontificate Master Carlos Ramos, and the exemplary and most “visited” works were those of Losa (Rua de Ceuta, Rua de Sá da Bandeira), Loureiro (the Parnaso building) of Viana de Lima (Bloco de Costa Cabral), Mário Bonito (Bloco do Ouro), but also in Lisbon the Bloco das Águas Livres by Nuno Teotónio Pereira.

But suddenly, these references were overlaid by a new vision of architecture to which the Survey of Portuguese Architecture and the work of Fernando Távora (the Market of Vila da Feira, the house of Ofir, the primary school of Cedro) and the theoretical influence of Zevi with his challenge to the Modern Movement and the appreciation of the work of Wright and the example of Alvar Aalto.

It is what at the time was called, in a very general way, the organic movement.

For me it was a different way of making architecture, more human, less functionalist, less rigid, a new language, but above all considering the interior space as an absolute value.

This is how Alvar Aalto appears as a reference in the School and the shift towards Finland begins.

Maybe more than the study visits to Finland marked the works of Alvar Aalto in Germany. The Bremen tower, the block in Hansa in Berlin, the cultural centre of Wolfsburg”.

— 01 EDUARDO SOUTO MOURA

“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

“First of all, I would like to ask what was your education like? What were your great ideals in terms of architecture and what were your great influences…?

My first degree was in Fine Arts. I give it more and more importance, because at the time there were practically no classes, they were experiences. We worked abroad, we did some meetings and some exercises that pedagogically were not very classical. More and more, as I get older and older, I recognise that there were situations of those times that marked me.

For example, the classes of a professor of mine, that already died, who was not a great communicator and on top of that it was early in the morning (at eight thirty) and we would go there full of sleep. But, theoretically speaking, he was the first person, that I remember, in the period of 1972, to talk to me about Rossi. He presented texts about the city and about history, but for us history was not a very important thing. Then, in the fourth year, I entered Siza’s office, where I stayed and never left. I still work with him, we do some projects together. He was the most representative and outstanding figure. In terms of architects in history, Mies Van der Rohe, and in terms of current architects, must be Herzog”.

— 02 JOÃO ÁLVARO ROCHA

“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 João Álvaro Rocha. One of the most referenced Portuguese architects, with a remarkable experience in the field of multi-family housing, and also in other types of works, such as public facilities, of various sizes, where I highlight the National Laboratory of Veterinary Research (LNIC), in Vairão, Vila do Conde, deserving an international award, among many. But it is mainly architecture and ways of living, housing and collective housing that I would like to talk about today. Especially the PER cases (special re-housing programme) that you have been building in recent years. I would like to start by asking you: what was your education and what were your first or greatest influences?

My degree – Oporto School, Fine Arts (still) – the famous model that made, posteriorly, the school known. The school of drawing, of the idea of being in place, of Siza. That is my education. Naturally, like in all education, with a positive and a negative aspects.

I would say that what I retain from the school (and what I think is the obligation of each and every school), and that for me, in my education, it was clear: the school gave me the capacity to (be), to know how to face any kind of situation and to know which path to choose in the face of the situation.

Naturally, it gave me some means: the famous drawing, an instrument of all this discourse that is known, known and, at the moment, already quite worn out. So, the question of influences or half influences, influences we all have since the day we were born. The cradle marks soon.

Naturally, during this educational period, I think it’s absolutely legitimate and perfectly natural to talk about Siza’s influence. It’s direct. I would even say that, in the first instance, it is completely unconscious. It is assimilated without knowing why, and, therefore, it doesn’t even assimilate, it reproduces. I was a student of Siza in the last year of the course. I was a student of half a dozen classes, because that corresponded to the period in which he began to be more called abroad, and consequently to have less time available. But actually those six classes did happen.

They were absolutely fundamental for me. Not so much for what was said, but more for what was not said. I remember perfectly one lesson (he was a construction professor and not a project professor) very early in the morning. It was some pranks that he was making: he arrived at 9am and there was nobody there, at 9.10am he left because nobody came (because he was going to catch a plane at 9.30am). In that class, we were talking about a window, a sill, the problem of the thickness of the sill, the material, the thickness of the aperture, if it’s in the middle, the thickness of the wall… And in ten minutes we were already at the implantation.

I remember perfectly that, at the end of those ten minutes, (it doesn’t matter what the conclusion of that conversation is, what interests me is what I retained) I realised “this can’t be anything like this, it has to be everything else”. I would say that, truly, my interest and my perception of what architecture is began at that time. Later, there is a second moment, which is also fundamental for me in terms of training (and I always see this as training): it was the architect Jorge Gigante.

My passage through his office was fundamental for me. Not so much because of the projects themselves, not so much because of the work they did – he and Francisco Melo – but fundamentally because of the way he was, the way he acted in terms of architecture…”.