Co-memorize means a form of recollection that is co-llective and co-elective¹. It’s about bringing to the present the quality of something that is identified as belonging to everyone and that is foundational. And, in fact, if Fernando Távora — whose centenary is now being marked — can be co-memorated, it is because in him we can identify the founding condition of a whole common space that defines the existence of a particular way of seeing, understanding and practicing architecture, which here and there has been called the school of Porto.

Throughout my studies at the Faculty of Architecture, I always felt a certain ambivalence, perhaps even a certain discomfort, about this designation. I now know why. Because, in fact, apart from a few people, nobody really knew what it was: «It’s the drawing!», «It’s the project!», “It’s history!», «It’s the synthesis of everything!».

In this sense, the expression school of Porto really did have the power of a myth: because it belonged to that realm of things that you only know on the condition that you don’t know what they are. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, one could effectively say that the «school of Porto is the school of Porto is the school of Porto is the School of Porto» [«a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose»]. But if the school has become a myth, if it has been mythologized, it is precisely because at a certain point it had to mystify its own conditions of existence in the context of a rapid transformation of the profession, but also of universities from the end of the 1990s until the final blow that was the crisis of 2009-2015. The financial and economic crisis didn’t just call into question an entire model of construction and architecture practice that flourished in Portugal from the 1980s onwards, but the very material conditions — political, social and economic — that supported this model: in other words, the end of the Welfare state project and the definitive affirmation of a neoliberal market order.

At the same time, the slow and painful delapidation of an idea of university, in which the «transmission of knowledge» gave way to the «acquisition of skills», with a student profile increasingly mobilized by the logic of the portfolio and entrepreneurship, but also haunted by the prospects of proletarianization and precariousness of the profession, further exacerbated a technical-technical becoming of architectural education: a positivist becoming of the project, we could say, always more focused on «how is it done? », rather than asking «why is it done?», even if it is comforted here and there by the horizon of the «professione poetica».

Curiously, the only people who seemed to reflect a concern about this whole state of affairs were no longer in the school — with the exception of a few — but outside it. Sérgio Fernandez, Alexandre Alves Costa, Álvaro Siza and even Eduardo Souto de Moura seemed to be the only ones to demonstrate a certain public concern about this process of transformation. At school: the myth was the form or, rather, the formula for silence.

Well, it was precisely in conversation with Eduardo Souto de Moura in 2023, in an interview for Electra magazine, that I was finally able to recognize the common constituent element that united all these generations of architects — Távora, Siza, Souto de Moura — and that seemed to define the core of this entity that went by the name school of Porto. If it were possible to reduce this element to a single word, I would venture to say: disquiet. Perhaps it could even be the title of a monograph: «School of Porto: a principle of disquiet». It’s not the drawing, it’s not the project, it’s not the history that defines this school, but the sense of a questioning of the things of the world from the perspective of architecture; a sense of restlessness marked by the tension between the ethical and social mission of architecture and the (in)postponed possibility of its realization as a project of all for all — the city, locus architectonicus; but also, a sense of disquiet present in the relationship between the discipline and the profession, in the tension between the local conditions of practice and the universal language of the disciplinary knowledge of architecture.

For Fernando Távora, as for Álvaro Siza or Souto de Moura, architecture is not simply a form of practice, but a form of knowledge. In his interview with Electra, Eduardo Souto de Moura sums up this principle in the expression: «there is no design without culture». And the same warning about schools and teaching was already found in Távora, in 1971, when he said, as candidly as lapidarily, that «the idea that an architect must above all be a wonderful pencil is an outdated idea, because there are no wonderful pencils without wonderful little heads».

If Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura are, among recognized architects, the only ones in Portugal, who have taken advantage of their visibility to express doubts about the current conditions of architecture, it is because they keep with them an idea of «architecture as a project» that is now definitely in question. But it’s also because they keep intact a condition of homme de lettres — as Le Corbusier was calling himself — that defines them not just as architects, but as intellectuals. Ah, intellectuals, what an unfashionable word! And yet it was precisely this figure of the architect as intellectual that marked and built the disciplinary heritage of the 20th century. And it is this condition that Siza and Souto de Moura carry, each in their own way: a vocation for permanent questioning, reflection on oneself, not in what makes them singular, but in what makes them plural. Not just introspection, but extrospection.

A vocation of disquiet in the world, we could say, that both of them undoubtedly owe to Fernando Távora; a principle of disquiet that has animated a whole way of being architecture that is, however, increasingly far from what is the current condition of the school of Porto. The school’s problem is not — as we so often hear — that it is standing still in time, but that it has lost its critical relationship with time: with the past, the present and the future. It’s a bit like in Kafka’s The Castle: the messengers keep going back and forth with their messages, but no one really knows what they mean or who they’re for. Tradition, heritage, as Jacques Derrida writes somewhere, is not a given, but a task.

That’s why the problem that co-memoration poses is as fundamental as it is decisive. Because the risk involved in any commemoration is always that of going to meet the past, when it is precisely the opposite: what is needed is to make the past meet the present, to challenge our present condition, our continuous immersion in the passivity of the time-of-now. In short, to make the past our faithful contemporary.

Co-memorizing Fernando Távora must therefore inevitably serve to re-recognize his work, to re-recognize his biography and his historical legacy, but it must also serve to re-recognize the present: to confront a model of being an architect — a model that Távora never tired of encouraging and mobilizing — and which today seems to be definitely on its way to extinction; to confront a model of the profession and a social and political sense of the discipline that is today in crisis; to confront a model of university teaching, of schools, of learning architecture that is in deep agony. But it also means — last but not least — confronting a whole model — which is absolutely dominant today — of disqualifying and devaluing intellectual work, research and study — work to which Távora also dedicated himself so passionately throughout his life. And this is an unavoidable responsibility that falls, first and foremost, to institutions like the one we are here in today. But without providing the minimum material conditions necessary for all those who dedicate themselves to this kind of work, it is the very forms of co-memoration that are definitively jeopardized.

What is the point of accumulating the past if it has become a souvenir, if we are incapable of knowing it? What is the point of building large archives if the conditions for research are scarce and it is treated as a kind of willful hobby? Because we must not forget, as Walter Benjamin did in the midst of the expansion of Nazism and Fascism at the beginning of the 1940s, that history is not a dead archive, but an unrelenting battle: