On Responsibility of the Choice, Introduction to the Dossier

On Responsibility of the Choice, Introduction to the Dossier

This dossier is the result of an invitation, in the form of a challenge, to select 16 texts on architecture to be published in the journal EP – Estudo Prévio, in the context of the celebration of its 20th number. The idea would be to publish, in Portuguese and English, a selection of fundamental texts about Portuguese architecture of recent decades.

One of the challenges we found most interesting, even as a criterion to guide us in the complex choice of the texts, was the unique possibility of translating into English a set of texts that we consider fundamental for a better and wider international understanding of our Portuguese architectural culture of the second half of the 20th century.

We know the importance that had, for example, the translation from Castilian to English of the text “No son genios lo que necesitamos ahora” (1961), by José António Coderch. This translation into English allowed an expansion of the discourse and research around Coderch, also contributing to a deeper analysis of his work.

In this selection exercise, we imagined a researcher in Delft, or a student in Zurich, to be able to have free online access to EP journal and be able to read a set of carefully chosen texts. It is not just the reading of isolated texts, it is also the reading of a set of authors, with their references and perspectives.

Resources for translation work are very rare and difficult to obtain, especially in the Portuguese architectural context, where it is not very common to translate older texts or books into English. It is significant to note that the English edition of Álvaro Siza’s Imaginar a evidência was only published in 2021 by Monade, with the title Imagining the Evident.

It is therefore a privilege to have the possibility to translate these 16 texts into English, in a set that represents an architectural thought and culture that has been built in a collective palimpsest of several generations, from the oldest texts by Fernando Távora, Nuno Teotónio Pereira and Pancho Guedes, to the most recent ones by Ana Tostões, Manuel Graça Dias and Paulo Varela Gomes.

The online publication of these texts is also an opportunity to revisit them or to read them for the first time. The texts also shed light about the critical acuteness of their authors, inviting readers to discover other writings of their own. Texts such as Nuno Portas’, for example, in a message sent to the National Meeting of Architects in 1969, are thus disseminated to a wider audience, opening the most varied possibilities of relationship and interpretation.  We have chosen to publish the texts in their original spelling, thus maintaining the spirit of the time of each one.