MANUEL VICENTE

It is with great pleasure that today we have the architect and professor Manuel Vicente as our guest. Be welcome!

Thank you very much, my pleasure too.

 

We wanted to start by asking you to tell us a little about your academic career as a student, if you had outstanding teachers and what the architecture course was like at the time.

It’s been over 50 years. I must have joined Fine Arts in 53 or 54, I don’t remember well.

I always went to schools, we lived in Parede, so I always walked in Parede. I had mobility problems and my parents were afraid that I would get on the train. There were better schools in Estoril, but as this one was right outside my house, I stayed there. It is a school that has no history and I think that the first time I felt the pleasure of being a student was, in fact, in the Fine Arts.

In Fine Arts I liked being there, I liked what I did. He liked not only the environment, but also the works that were offered to us. It was a school where we had no respect for the teachers there. In that post-war generation, conflict with teachers was a kind of school culture. There were teachers that you couldn’t possibly like…

There was Luís Alexandre Cunha, I think I learned things from him that I still remember today, they were not concrete things, nor necessarily disciplinary things, they were ways of looking at the world, and fun concerns. The first thing we did was to line the drawers with paper, he (Cunha) really wanted us to have the measure, that the measure was a sensitivity, not necessarily the measuring tape, and said: “Fold the paper, now turn the paper, already has the measure on your fingers! Make another fold and you don’t need to go and see how much the fold is… whether it’s 2 centimeters or not. ” Then we had to make the glue, there we put the glue and there we stretched the paper, and then we dipped it in a big sponge, everything was soaked, and we stretched it, stretched it and then when it dried it was an impeccable clipboard, all lined with scenery paper! And that was in his class, let’s say we learned, this practice we had, it was in his class: lining the stretchers. I haven’t used lined stretchers in years, but I think I was still able to line one. Then, over the course of the course, the works were usually presented on panels, so we had to repeat this ceremony of gluing the papers on a grid, but it was always this technique that we had learned in the first year.

There was also Cristino da Silva, who was a man for whom we also had very little esteem and consideration at the time. He had done the Capitol, but at that time we didn’t know, he had done the Cinearte, there in Santos. He was a man who had started with a, say, modernist approach to drawing and architectural design. His exercise program was always in a large free zone, on the outskirts of a large city. He was a man who wanted people to start again, with freedom, without constraints. When I did my thesis, I was making a house for some brothers-in-law, and I talked about the needs, the money they had, that it was a young family, they had two young children… and he said “Gentlemen, come here, this is your last chance to dream, and why do you come with all this embarrassment? The man! Do something as you like, don’t worry! ”. He had a certain aversion to constraints and said: “So, how do you imagine? You will now leave here with your diploma, but you will never again be free to imagine, enjoy! ”.

He was this type of teacher, but he did have a formal relationship, I think he would have liked it not to be so formal, but the society in Lisbon at that time was not much to facilitate an intergenerational dialogue. The teacher was a teacher, he did not give confidence to the student. Then he said some thanks, but the student didn’t have to answer, it was always a distant relationship.

But he had an assistant that we really liked, Alberto José Pessoa. Alberto Pessoa is the man who made those blocks on Avenida Infante Santo. He had a partnership with João Abel Manta and Gandra, they did that project together. I think the great mentor of that project was him. We really liked Alberto Pessoa, who came from Keil do Amaral’s group, all with their own sense of humor. He did things very seriously, I remember a project that had a spiral staircase, and he went like this with the pencil and said: “Then there is a fire and the firemen come, start the stairs with the hose , stumble and… die! ” These are short stories … a colleague of ours who did not excel in brightness or intelligence, poor thing, at one point had very extravagant bathrooms, and he said: “I don’t see where you’re going to get the dishes in the house shower? ” and she said: “O master, the dishes in the bathroom?” and he answered again: “These are not, these are others!”

He was such a man, it was fun. Then he challenged me to work in his studio, and in the studio he was not the same person he was at school, so after a while, I came up with a pretext, and he also understood, and I left.

 

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How was your journey after university? He was in India, in Macau, then went to study in the United States.

Between the school of Fine Arts, which I finished in 1960/61, and my trip to the United States in 1968, a lot of time passed. I was in Goa first, I was in Macau a year, I returned to Lisbon a year, where I worked with Conceição Silva, then I went to Funchal, where I worked with Góis Ferreira. Then I wanted to go to America, and I went through a Fullbright scholarship … I put Berkley first, which was where everything was happening at that time, in 1968. Then I had Columbia, because it was New York, and I thought that very interesting things were going on in New York, and in the end, I had put Philadelphia, because of Kahn. But let’s say it was for social, sociological reasons, I was interested in understanding what was going on and let’s say that academic choices were important, but they were the least important. And I was accepted in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. And when I went there, I was 33 and had already built a lot….

 

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In Macau, he did many projects in a very short time.

I did many, in five years I made and built eight or nine buildings, it was practically all public order, I only had two private clients. For one I did some houses on a difficult street, it was my first job – I mean, I had to change my parents’ house – but the first entirely new job was these four townhouses. I also made a church that was not built afterwards, for a missionary brotherhood. I made a house for relocation of ninety apartments with a minimum program, in a large area of ​​Macau, which was full of displaced people – after the great upheavals that occurred in China, many people were displaced and emigrated to Macau. As Macau had a lot of empty land, barracks were built. It was a very different world of peasants, in the middle of a city, who were creating urban habits. The kids were very funny, in the morning they all went to school, they in black skirts and socks, and the kids in gray pants and blazers, and they all came out of the barracks.

At one point there was a project done here, in Lisbon, when Adriano Moreira was overseas minister. He commissioned some of my colleagues to design the neighborhood for this border area with China, and all of that was totally unrealistic and on top of that it was suspicious, because it was paid for by Americans, and Americans at that time could not penetrate China. People who wanted to apply for houses in that neighborhood had to fill out some forms, and they were all registered. The governor at the time did not find this funny, and neither did Adriano Moreira, the project was discontinued and we, in the urbanization office, which was a staff organ of the governor, were in charge of making a plan there. We outlined a plan with a distribution of types of fires by dimensions of the household. But then the logic of the distribution of the fires was different, it started with the bigger families, fires that we had destined for families of 2/3 people, started to have families of 16 people. But Macau has always been a city with a history of great density, densities that are perfectly unbelievable and impossible to sustain in Europe.

Macau was not a city of major conflicts, which is almost unbelievable and astonishing, given the housing conditions in the city itself are very harsh. Cantonese people lived a lot on the street, did not receive at home, received at the restaurant, gave their parties in restaurants, in public places, and it was not exactly the concept of home we had, it was not their culture, we lived a lot on the street . Macau had this enormous and extraordinary vitality, all the public places were very busy, noisy, had a crowd, had tents, sold food, sold clothes, sold everything and more… it’s funny because, little by little, there was a penetration of consumption, which also transformed society, started to have their houses more decorated, called decorators to make the rooms for them. The richest had a lot of these things, but that was not why they lived at home anymore, or started to eat at home.

I made a huge mansion for a very rich man, and one day he called me there because he wanted to do an extension of a balcony and “beautify”, because it was in that hidden corner that he and his wife spent their days, they had a big screen television, and the rest of the house was fully furnished, but uninhabited and they were both there, they were already a certain age, there they played Mahjong, there they ate … There I designed their balcony and sunroom and they were apparently very happy!

I remember that I was in Brussels once, in 1989 and at a certain point, I was on a street and I felt something strange, something I couldn’t describe, and then I realized what it was, is that the street was completely empty! He was alone on that street, it was a central street, a wide street. I looked, turned around, turned around, and I was the only person on that street. And I thought: “How funny, in Macau, you were never alone!”. And that covers twenty-four hours! Macau was always, perpetually busy, on the move in this intense sociability. It was nice to live in a place like that, where everything was always working.

 

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And when he arrives in the United States, he already has a different experience, living on several continents and already with a professional career that gives him another maturity.

I was the oldest in that group of people. Two hundred people competed, and they chose twenty … And it was funny, because of these twenty candidates, fourteen were foreigners! There was a very funny guy, a Jew, but he was from South Africa, there was a Lebanese, there were Chinese, there were Japanese, there were Germans, Swiss, there was me who was Portuguese. Americans were not the majority. It was funny, we spent each other’s lives at home, but there was a huge difference in experience and culture.

They did not get to acquire knowledge, they came with the practice of gathering information. There were no computers yet, but the library was a place to go, where photocopies were made, there was a large production. We Europeans, especially the French, Italians and Spaniards, had a very different relationship with learning. We read the books that interested us, we didn’t read the books because we had a meeting and we were obliged to read those books all… We went to the library to read one book, and by chance we found another one, and we were reading the other one that was much more interesting than what we were supposed to read. We were freer, we weren’t so surprised, we weren’t very focused on specialization.

I attended a course – it was the beginning of all this environmental ecological wave – with a funny, Scottish man, Ian Mac Carg. He taught very interesting classes because he invited the world’s leading experts to come and talk about his discipline. We non-Americans took great advantage of that, because we heard fabulous stories, experiences in disciplinary areas that we were not very familiar with. He heard that and was fascinated and went to the library in search of books. It must have been the first time in my life that I went to a library. At the School of Fine Arts there was something hidden there that must have been a library, but we never went there … The books we read were the ones that advised each other. I read what was read, what an architecture student was supposed to read, I read Le Corbusier, but we read through extracurricular training, but I am very surprised that Cristino da Silva has read some architecture book in his life; Alberto Pessoa must also never have read any books on architecture or theory.

But you learned a lot, it was a training that had a lot of craftsmanship, you learned a trade. We learned to draw, to create equivalences between the idea and the object, we created a certain dexterity to perceive proportions and dimensions of things. We managed, in some way, to manage the space, we had this formation, which was a formation of trades, the teachers were masters, as in traditional crafts, and then we had a concurrent formation that was the history of art and archeology, but truly, the what we were doing there was the project, in an environment of great camaraderie, we helped each other – sometimes those from the last year would help those from the following year, because they were anxious to deliver the work and came to recruit labor. It was a very funny collective, and as the rooms were large, there was a lot of space and a lot of area, it was very much a life! We lived there, often left very late, sometimes we finished the work with street lighting because the continuum, to send us away, turned off the lights, and we took the clipboards to the window. It was very much a distinction that Kahn makes between the way of life and the way of life, that was our life, from there we radiated to life in the city …

 

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I was saying that in the United States, he realized that the investigation went a little beyond the craft. This idea of ​​architecture as a craft could expand knowledge about architecture much more.

I always thought as an architect, and I say something that can be a little pretentious: in books, I only clarified better what I already knew, or what I already intuited. I never learned anything from a book! I remember being very happy and I said: “Yeah, well, that’s exactly it! This is what I wanted to say! ” This is not only about architecture, but about life in general. Books for me have always been meeting points with myself, clarifying, explaining the intuitions of my own functioning, of my relationship with the observer, of my observation of reality, of my interpretation, which later became more clarified, more clarified, better than what I was able to say without the illumination that the books brought me.

I think that in architecture the investigation is the project, the investigation is the design. When I go to design a hotel I don’t have to buy all the books about hotels. I’ve been to enough hotels in my life, I know what it is, I know a lot more of what I don’t like about hotels than what I like. If I am not going to investigate for an application, if I am going to investigate for investigating, I think that at some point I lose my imagination, I am overwhelmed by the avalanche of information. After a guy receives all that information, he loses his imagination, he is completely terrified, he is never more natural to separate the essential from the accessory, to create conditions for things to happen.

When asked if I realized the advantages of a certain support, say, academic and technical, I think it was more a question of method – it is also a question of culture, we do not have a culture of organization, the American has that culture. But that doesn’t mean I came back from America with any American habits, I didn’t come back from Macau with Chinese habits either, I think a person who already has his own structure. I didn’t come from America to eat dogs and buy a barbecue for the back of the house, but I ate barbecue, why not? But it cannot be said that I became too Americanized, it was impossible. I think we have a strong cultural structure, made up of habits, traditions, tastes, dislikes, sensitivities, ways of looking. This is also true, in relation to the rural people, a rural woman of sixty who moves to the city, comes with her certainties and her convictions and her security and ideas about the world. It is interesting to see this cultural mark in people who are not completely unaware of what they will like, without knowing what they like. This is seen a lot in our current situation, and in our ruling class, there is in fact very little taste, people have really lost that deep relationship with memory …

 

This profound cultural capital of which you speak. Do you think it is still a real capital? An asset for our newly graduated architects? Many of them are going to work in other countries.

I think cosmopolitanism is a very important thing, and I find my way of being very cosmopolitan.

I think Brazilians are deeply educated, they come here and no one takes away the samba, and the feijoada. The Brazilian is sure of himself in many ways: he may not have money, but he is not a poor devil. It has these great cultural roots, the food, the music, the rhythm, the way of being, the fascination, the ability to look around, to be fascinated by the noises, the sounds, the flavors … But I think that whoever he goes empty, not only does he have little to give, but he also places himself in a position of great fragility vis-à-vis the other, they leave without any wealth, they are destined to be servants. Whoever does not say what he wants, does what he does not want, does what others want. It is in this sense that I think that it is not possible to send people into life so little manned, with so little capital. But, on the other hand, I have an idea, of your colleagues who went abroad, and things that apparently seemed forgotten here are remembered, and that there is a greater accumulation within them than can be supposed.

 

And what is the teacher’s role?

As a teacher, I am much more interested in students discovering what they did not know they knew. The examples we usually give are to take them to seek memories they did not know they had, intuitions, reasons why they feel good and cannot explain why, why they arrive at a cafe and choose to go to that corner instead of going To the other. Why is it taken for granted? And to value this acquired, to bring it to the top, as in psychoanalysis, to bring the unsaid to the area of ​​the said, to have names for what is known, to establish connections that were intuitive but that one was afraid to say.

I think it was important for people to leave the university safe, not so sure of their technical competence, but sure of their humanity, of their ability, to make windows, whether they be the frames or whatever. Any of the students, when presenting the final project, presents from the inside, tells the story from the inside: “… I go up the stairs, and I have this window in front…” – and one realizes the invention of a dwelling, which does not it is an invention of an object, it is not an example of design, it is an example of the invention of spaces with shapes, inviting to be comfortable, but with the comfort of body and mind. A person has pleasure, sometimes he can even be in a chair a little hard, but it is so warm, the sun comes in in such a good way and we start talking … Kahn said that … It is more important to know what “is”, than that the “how”, because the “how” is found in the “doing”.

It may not help the industry much that a person does not know exactly how things are done, but it is much more important for life to know what you want to do, because the “how” is everywhere! You open the computer, you go to the internet, you go to Google and it’s there how to preach this, and how to do that. I think that things are for people and not people for things, and as complex as it may seem, building any architecture is not half as complex as building a rocket to go to the Moon, or a atomic submarine.

We know perfectly how life appears, little by little, then there are some molecules that multiply, there are some that are attracted by having a negative charge and others that are positive, and then they start creating more complex things, and they end up arriving at the thought and human intelligence…. And we have to realize that nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed and that you cannot cross your arms and give up.

That is to say, although at the moment the investment priorities of intelligence and resources are very much shifted towards a vision of profit from capital, income – finance has taken priority over the economy, there is no economic thinking, there is financial thinking – and therefore a large part of humanity’s resources are invested in things that have nothing to do with life, that do not serve the progress of life. I mean, there are medicines that are not manufactured for Africa because it is not worth it, there is no market that compensates for the production of medicines, and therefore we live in a world with very perverted priorities, due to the relentless logic of the return on capital…

I remember very well, in my time, people saying like this: “How did Alfredo da Silva get rich ?, Look, he was lending widows very high interest …!”, Therefore, in my time, in my time parents, the usurer, the pawnshop guy, was socially very disqualified and no one respected the person who had enriched themselves through this kind of maneuvering and business, and lending money at interest, and taking income and receiving rent. There were always things that were not well seen… ”But then he bought it for five pennies and sold it for 25 contos? So, isn’t that weird? ” So this legitimacy, this arrogance, this arrogance of the rights of capital is a relatively new, recent thing … I know that I am 76 years old, but I remember perfectly that capital was not considered as it is today, a person distrusted the socially rich, but it was not only the nobleman who lived on the exploitation of peasants, he was suspicious of fresh money, and even the people who lived on his job or on his industry were also very suspicious of fresh money, there was also a lot of corruption in the previous regime, now “democratized corruption ”, before it was more selective…

 

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Thinking about this current problematic globality – with capital being put at the head of everything – what perspective do you have on the potential of architecture, that is, what added value can the architecture that is being made today, or that it may be done? , contribute to continue to evolve, for the world not to stagnate and to look to the past?

I am optimistic by character and I am optimistic by principle, by ideology.

Almada Negreiros, the painter, once asked him if he was pessimistic or optimistic, and he said it was neither, because there was no misunderstanding between him and life. I think it’s a pretty nice answer, I never forgot. I have hope, I think that everything always ends up resolving itself. In the short term, maybe it will be very difficult, the whole situation can be very tragic, but this is much more important for you than for a person who is already leaving…

But, in terms of architecture, what do you refer to goodwill, earth architecture, to go back to the past, I think that, despite everything, there is still a mode of production and an industrial device sufficiently important and powerful in its dimension, in skills and competences, and it is not plausible to turn to adobe and straw. I think it would be true in the case of a Hecatomb, with all systems failing, all you have to do is to fail the electricity to be in the dark, largely in the dark, of the information, of the light, to eat… We would have to discover a number of things that not even we don’t even have a memory. But in less catastrophic scenarios, I think that architecture is missing people and that we need a place to be well, comfortable, to be with others and with us.

Family graves are houses to be, they are not houses to be. And I think that happiness, well-being more than well-being – that it is difficult to be well-being without well-being – that this harmony between being and being, are really the epitome of happiness. Whether inside or outside the house, on the top of the mountain, on the beach, wherever, even the Germans, when summer comes they all go to the Mediterranean, it is very difficult to live without having these moments of pleasure, calm, splendor, and the House of Man is not just a house of convenience, it is the House of Man, it is a broad sense …

We are living here in this studio, the office, the factory, the hospital, therefore, the dwelling of Man, he is supposed to be protected from the inclemencies of Nature, so this protection is also necessary, it is necessary to have its places modest, where rest, sleep. Having their sites related to the outside, having sites related to themselves, and it is not the science of construction that solves the problems of the Being’s dwelling… As I say, there is no architecture without construction, but there is a lot of construction without architecture, on the other hand, when construction is confused with the real estate business, when the real estate company seeks decoration with a kind of ornaments to cover nudity and the complete inanity of what they propose for people to live in, maybe it is in a perverse circle that can only be ended in destruction. I mean, I wanted to remove from the architecture that notion that “… Ah! If I have money, I still call an architect! ”, I wanted to make architecture a more vital thing, I wanted people to be aware that there must be quality in living, as well as quality in eating.

 

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I think that the human species is not concerned with the production of pleasure, with the production of ample comfort. I often say, happy for those who do what they like, because they don’t need to spend money on whiskey! As João Santa-Rita’s mother used to say, “But don’t you see that the architects’ beach is the studio?” It was really true, working on what you like is a great pleasure, when the production takes an advance on the pleasure of producing, when the need (this is also Kahn’s), when the need erases the desire, when a person only does it things to have to receive a salary, and need the salary to pay the installments of the car, and the woman annoys him because the neighbor has already bought a better car than theirs, and has no Scotch, has Berber whiskey…. The priorities are very inverted. I think that slavery today, although less spectacular and less spectacular, is much harder and heavier than it ever was, we are forced consumers. Even pleasure is already produced outside of us and is already sold to us and everything lives in obsolescence. The things that were cool two years ago are no longer now, and I think all of this is very serious, much more problematic than CO2, or oil or unsustainable development, makes life much more unqualified. Any kind of relationship with the Human, with Humanity has been lost, which is why I prefer to speak of pleasure, taste, well-being and well-being, of a person feeling full and content!

A person who has a messy office says: “Look, today I put everything in the drawer, I put everything in the drawer, the books on the shelves… I feel so good!”, montages feel great, you have to drink some glasses, you have to do some stupid things, you have to go to the gym… We spend our lives doing things to forget everything we did, instead of spending our lives make efforts to find pleasure and happiness and that well-being, that well-being, that being at peace.

You don’t have to go out every night, or go dancing, or do anything, just be, be good, be at peace, not be full of problems: “… Tomorrow it will be a bore, and the road is full, and the metro it broke down, and I have to go half an hour before I miss the bus… ”. One cannot live in this stress at all. I also don’t have to live on one side (of the city) and work on the other. Maybe cities shouldn’t be so specialized. A guy should be able to work there two steps from where he lives. All that dream of a city, without cars, that I don’t share, all of that would be true if people manage to make short trips. Now, if a person lives in Oeiras and works in Setúbal, it is very difficult, it makes no sense. And then, if the crisis comes, transport prices increase, it still makes less sense, and if you lose your job it still makes less sense …

 

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You can’t live this way, I mean, it’s horrible, and that’s one of my hopes. At some point, people say: “I can’t take it anymore! Not like this! I can not!”. It doesn’t matter at all to have a program, people, well thinking, are very irritated by these movements that are now in the occupation and the street, “Because there is no program, because there is no project…”, I think it is much more vital than this, I think people have to say that it is enough, enough, like José Régio’s verses: “… I don’t know where I’m going, but I know that I’m not going…”. And I think this is a right of citizenship, a right of the person, when people can really say: – “But I don’t want to go there!”, – “But then you die of hunger!”, – “Then I die from hunger, screw it! ”. It is better to die of hunger than to die of indignity. And in that sense I think that architecture is very much part of people’s vital needs, architecture has always been made, housing has always been celebrated. Even in the caves, they painted, recording their memories … It was what gave them pleasure in rock painting, rock painting is a manifestation of the soul, of the joy of man at work! As Ruskin said, a person has to be happy at work, we are often in the studios, we are solving a project, and there is a time when a guy does something he likes so much – at least in the studios I used to visit – “ Hey, come here, everyone, come and see this, isn’t this great ?! ”, a guy has to tell, has to show, there have to be these outbursts of joy.

Each person is each person and he has to create his own opportunities, I would say for a long time that if I hadn’t taken a higher education, one of the things I wouldn’t mind being a driver or a bricklayer. I think it must be cool for someone to be on a construction site and put the bricks and watch the wall grow. And a chauffeur, because I like cars a lot, I like to ride a car, I’m a traveler, I like the show a lot, I have a lot of fun riding a car, whether I’m driving or not, I like to see the world slide by me , and choose my views. An architect can be a driver, he can be a bricklayer, he can be anything he wants, as long as he is happy. I hope you can be an architect, but the practice of the profession can be done in such a alienating and alienated way, in a large real estate company – that you need the architects to help brown the pill of those crap they want to sell and that marketing has studied and says that it has to be like that – I also don’t know if at a certain point, if I had to be an architect in these conditions, if I didn’t prefer to be a bricklayer.

 

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Although I am optimistic, I think that at the moment there is no answer, only if you can go to work in developing countries, I think it can be very rewarding there. There is greater pleasure there than seeing something growing and building, taking shape. This is happiness! Like when Miguel Ângelo finished sculpting one of his famous statues and threw the hammer with the hammer, I think the hammer mark is still there, and he said “SPEAK!” Suddenly a person gets very close to the sublime, transforms the raw material, makes the insignificant signify, puts stone on stone, builds, makes things mean. Like when Lévi-Strauss tells in the “Sad Tropics” in South America, that a sorcerer identified 150 different herbs, where he only saw grass. This effort to nominate the unnamed… Everything is still to be named, there is still a lot to be named, this pleasure of organizing the world in our image and likeness.

A person can be agnostic or not, but among us, he always has a Catholic background, in which, in fact, we were created in the image and likeness of God, and there is always this desire to continue this gesture of creation, to organize things so that people can recognize themselves in them. We can find the right rhythm again, even if it is at the scale of the planets, we can spend the summer on Mars and the winter on the Moon, whatever! Going to the Algarve or going to Mars is circumstantial, a man always needs to feel good, wherever he goes!