Remembering an iconic Portuguese architect: Fernando Távora

To all architects who feel neither a genius nor a zero, and who daily contribute with their (more or less) anonymous architecture - "work made by men for men".

«For years I thought of Architecture as something different, something special, sublime and extra-terrestrial, and anything like an untouchable white virgin, so sublime, so ideal that it was only rare to realize or understand it; for me, the architect was either a semi divine genius or just a zero. There was no relationship between the small hut and the most famous work of architecture, as there was no relationship between the bricklayer and the architect. They were different things, disconnected. This mythical concept of architecture and the architect produced an atrocious suffering in me, since I was not a genius and therefore I could not make buildings as untouchable as white virgins. The years went by. I saw buildings and I met architects. I realized that a building is not contained in a beautiful plan or in a beautiful photograph taken on a sunny day and under its best angle; I noticed that, after all, all architects were men, with their qualities, greater or lesser, and with their defects, greater or lesser. I then believed that architecture was above all an event like so many others that fill the lives of men and, like all of them, subject to the contingencies that the same life implies. And the untouchable white virgin became for me a manifestation of life.

Having lost its abstract sense, I then found Architecture as something that I or any other man could achieve - better or worse -, terribly contingent, as attached to circumstance as a tree with its roots attaches itself to the earth. And the myth was shattered. And between the small hut and the masterpiece, I saw that there were relations, as I know, between the bricklayer (and any other man) and the architect of genius. Seen from this angle, architecture now appears to me like great force, a force born of Earth and man, bound by a thousand threads to the changing reality, a force capable of contributing powerfully to the happiness of the environment that sees it born. Effect and cause is thus one of the weapons that man has for the creation of his own happiness. I tried to attend to everything, from the winds that hit the place to the use of materials, from the official norms to the physical and spiritual well-being of students and teachers, from the cost of construction to the slope of the land, etc., etc., etc. But, trying to attend to everything, I tried to create a hierarchy of these conditions and integrate them into a whole that was something more than a sum of its parts. Like a tree, this building has its roots, gives shade and protection to those who are protected by it, has its moments of beauty and, just as it was born, one day it will die after living its life. It is not, in fact, an untouchable and eternal virgin, but a small and simple work made by men for men. »

- Fernando Távora