Books
Souto de Moura’s Oeuvre
The publisher Arquitectura Viva recently released a volume on Eduardo Souto de Moura, with a preface penned by Luis Fernández-Galiano and an introductory article by Kenneth Frampton. It is an exhaustive revision, counting as many as 340 pages, that goes through forty-five building works carried out in the course of the period between 1980 and 2025, beginning with the Carandá Market in Braga and concluding with the Quinta do Ribeiro in the vicinity of the same city. Forty-five among which are the Portuguese architect’s best known works, but also some less publicized, the inclusion here of which in itself is a strong point of the book.
In my opinion it is the most complete monograph on the master to date, and its wealth of graphic and photographic material is impressive. This is certainly no banality in a publication of the kind: profusion of images, granting that they are selected and organized with rigor, proves particularly helpful when we want to analyze and understand building works and how they were materialized, enabling us to relate photos with construction drawings.
Presented in chronological order, with no need to differentiate temporal, geographic, or thematic particularities, the book endeavors to convey to the reader not so much the individual worth of each project as the overwhelming value of Souto’s entire oeuvre, so copious and intense, making clear the editors’ admiration for an author who identifies life with a passion for his craft. Those of us fortunate to be able to consider ourselves Eduardo’s friends, who hence also know him as a person, will have no trouble seeing this publication as a tribute to a synthesis of life and architecture, an experience which, alas, one does not easily find in a world where building work has begun to depend more on a corporate than on a personal result, and on processes dominated by motives foreign to the discipline instead of by arguments anchored to it.
It could indeed be said that the conceptual framework which structures this highly extensive work is grounded on five ideas. The first is a balance between attention to context as the starting point, and an enlightened abstraction as instrument essential to materializing the commission. The second is a vision of the project as a highly useful tool in upgrading and bringing out the surrounding landscape in all its glory, be it natural or urbanized. The third is the treatment of materiality as a resource in developing the project, thinking of the structure as a primordial part of it. And the fourth is a refined elaboration of detail from an angle of simplicity. Thanks to all the foregoing, the unity of the whole is in accord with the specificity of every single work, in a coexistence that always strikes the observer as extraordinary and difficult, but which can be appreciated in each one of the projects included in this publication. Conceptual unity and contextual diversity.
