The 3 Architects of Reference in Portuguese Architecture

Arménio Losa e Cassiano Barbosa

“OASRN and the City Council of Porto, CMP, launch, on November 29, Saturday, 10:00 am, at Café Ceuta, the architectural map / script of the Arménio Losa / Cassiano Barbosa atelier in the city of Porto. The screenplay features 24 works by Arménio Losa / Cassiano Barbosa and Arménio Losa / Alfredo Matos Ferreira / Beatriz Madureira, in the city of Porto. Edited in Portuguese, English and Spanish, with a print run of 40,000 copies, the itinerary will be available at the OASRN secretariat and at Oporto tourism offices. “Arménio Losa (1908-1988) and Cassiano Barbosa (1911-1998), architects formed by the Porto School of “Belas Artes”, respectively, in 1932 and 1935, began in 1939 a renovation and transformation of architecture in northern Portugal, confirmed quality of the projects and works carried out.

The understanding and strict manipulation of international models and their morphological and typological translation and conciliation to the city of Porto constitute the novelty and capacity of an architecture marked by the rationalization and functionalist vision of its authors. The new architecture internationally announced by Le Corbusier is reinvented and integrated in the formal reality and material of Porto, through experiments and investigations inspired by the present and contemporaneity of the social and cultural life of modern urbanism. The conviction and affirmation of the concepts of A. Losa and C. Barbosa originate a spatiality inherited by the following generations that reacting or following their ideals, create an architecture with a
unique regional genealogy, unpublished. (…) The projects and works of Arménio Losa and Cassiano Barbosa thus constitute an architectural and historical heritage that must be translated and discovered on the streets of the city.”

Find here the architectural map provided by the Northern architects order on the works of Arménio Losa and Cassiano Barbosa.

Desired text of the website “Ordem dos Arquitectos Norte”

José Marquês da Silva 

If we said that José Marques da Silva was the architect who shaped Porto’s physiognomy at the beginning of the 20th century means that, in order to understand his figure, we must try to identify not only his constructed work but also the weight of his arguments and ideas in the city’s culture. His first work of great urban significance was the São Bento Station (1896-1916).
It marks in a monumental way the urban reconfiguration triggered by the arrival of the railroad in the center of the city. In the natural sequence of the Station, Avenida dos Aliados was the urban project that consolidated these dynamics and, as a municipal architect, Marques da Silva managed the interests of the plan and coordinated the implementation of the projects that configured it, in addition to designing some of its buildings. Apart from this determining function in Marques da Silva built several other works in the center of the city, such as the National Theater of St. John (1910-1920), the completion of the Palace of the Count of Vizela (1920-1923), the Four Seasons Building (1905 ), Lycées Alexandre Herculano (1914-1930) and Rodrigues de Freitas (1919-1933) and several single-family dwellings consolidated their prestige as an architect in Porto. (…). His main works include the Serralves House and Gardens in Porto (1925-1943), where, in tune with his client, he conciliated the contributions of prestigious French architects in a work with qualities In its multiple fronts Marques da Silva left a lasting legacy in the architectural culture of Porto, in the landscape of the city, in the project culture of the architects, in the teaching practices, in a certain way of making and thinking
the architecture that has been consolidating in Porto throughout the 20th century. ”

We leave here a script of all the large-scale works of this architect provided by the OASRN.

Text extracted from the foundation Marquês da Silva.

Fernando Távora

Finally, MJARC Architects can not fail to speak of one of the founders of modern architecture and the greatest Portuguese Architects, Fernando Távora, architect and professor. “Founder of the so-called Porto School, he was a teacher of Siza Vieira and Souto de Moura, being a reference for successive generations of architects. His teaching career is linked to several educational institutions: to the School of Belas Artes of Porto (ESBAP), where he begins to teach; to the constitution of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP); and, at the end of the 1980s, XX, to the creation of the Department of Architecture of the University of Coimbra (DARQ-FCTUC), being honored with the honorary Doctorate in 1993. Between 1951 and 1959 he is the Portuguese delegate in the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM), where he knows the masters of modern architecture, like Le Corbusier. In 1955 he joined the team responsible for the Portuguese Regional Architecture Survey, a study promoted by the National Union of Architects on architecture in Portugal, published in 1961. Man of culture, Tavora travels throughout his life to study the architecture of all times and the different continents. He considers that a good knowledge of the history of architecture is the basis of a good project. It is this knowledge base that seeks to instill in its students, urging them to travel. Fernando Távora is the author of a vast physical work, which crosses different scales from dwellings to urban studies. It is a pioneer in the rehabilitation, being responsible for the requalification of the historical center of Guimarães. Its architecture, while possessing a strong modern dimension, goes even further, giving special attention to the site, history and pre-existences. Its projects combine functionality and technical rigor with the valorization of the existing and the characteristics of the local architecture. According to Távora in each building must be used what is proper for this building, there must be harmony between existing and new intervention.

Find here,  the map of Távora provided by OASRN.