Fernando Schiappa de Campos was born on 20 April 1926. In the early 1950s he attended the Escola Superior de Belas Artes in Lisbon (ESBAL), from where he graduated in 1954 with a diploma in architecture. The theme of his dissertation gave an early indication of his interest in school buildings, which he was to consolidate in the initial phase of his professional career. He designed a private school for Torres Novas using a modern, International Style-influenced language that was to characterise his work at least up until the 1970s. The design was based on a linear organisation that was later to structurally define other school buildings designed by Schiappa de Campos for the State. Contradicting statements by fellow students as to the “more conservative” atmosphere at the Lisbon school, he has highlighted Cristino da Silva’s receptiveness to his design proposal for his CODA diploma (Architect Diploma Competition). Particular features of the design were the functional aspects that were privileged over the aesthetic characteristics. This was to become a dominant feature of his body of work, and was one that his Lisbon professor encouraged. He has also stressed the contribution Luís Alexandre da Cunha, his construction teacher, made to his more technical education.
     By 1956 Schiappa de Campos had joined the Overseas Planning Office (GUU) as a freelance architect, having spent some time as a teacher in technical and preparatory education. The GUU, which reported to the Overseas Ministry (MU), had been set up by Marcelo Caetano in 1944 (it was originally called the Colonial Planning Office and had been under the responsibility of the Ministry for the Colonies) to “study and monitor education and development in the colonies’ population centres” (Decree-Law no. 34 173 of 6 December). From its base at Alameda Dom Afonso Henriques in Lisbon, in addition to the urban plans for the colonies it was responsible for the main public buildings to be built in the overseas parts of the Portuguese Empire. It later moved to offices on the 5th floor of the MU in Restelo, Lisbon.
     In this context Schiappa de Campos became one of those responsible for drawing up the Standards for Grammar and Vocational School Buildings in the Overseas Provinces (1956), together with the architect João António Aguiar, who was at the time director of the GUU, and the civil engineer Eurico Gonçalves Machado from the Directorate General for Urbanisation at the Ministry of Public Works. His prior experience most likely played a role in his being chosen to be part of this group, where Aguiar played a secondary role.
     The document outlined a methodology based on rationalist principles, which, generally speaking, reflected the approach to design developed at these State offices. The objective was to establish a theoretical framework that would safeguard the functioning of the schools built by the State, within the ideals of economy and building standardisation, without apparently including “any provisions of an aesthetic character”, as the wording of the Standards puts it. According to Schiappa de Campos, the use of monumentalised figuration in line with what was conventionally known as “regime architecture”, which homogenised the architectural output of the GUU, was due to the influence of the leading figures of Aguiar or Lucínio Cruz, whose buildings for Metropolitan Portugal followed a similar figuration.
     Between 1956 and 1960 Schiappa de Campos was responsible, either on his own or in partnerships, for the designs for the Elementary Technical Schools of Silva Porto, Malange, Nampula and Inhambane, the Freire de Andrade (Beira) and Quelimane Commercial Schools and the Nova Lisboa Grammar School. Where he wasn’t a member of the design team he took part in the Review Committee that were set up to analyse the quality of school building design projects produced internally by the GUU. He did not devote himself exclusively to new schools and was involved in a wide range of programmes. But he did so while always transmitting modernity through compliance with technical standards, for example control of sun exposure and assurance of transversal ventilation, even if the elevations remained true to historicist ideals. These measures characterised the essential for any design project in the tropics.
     Contradicting the lack of preparation so often attributed to GUU professionals, the MU invested in their specialisation and sent some of its specialists to the UK in the 1950s when studies on tropical environments were in vogue. Some of them received training in urban planning in Oxford, while others attended the Tropical Architecture course at the Architectural Association (AA) in London taught by modernist experts, such as the Maxwell Frys and Jane Drew (who worked with Le Corbusier in Chandigarh) or the German specialist Otto Koenigsberger.
     The London course also recommended observation of indigenous solutions. Schiappa de Campos studied at the AA in 1958, returning to Portugal the next year at the end of the six-month course. The influence of that training can be found in the design for the Standard Rural School he developed for Guinea in 1961, which combined the teachings of modernist culture with the various ethnic traditions that made up Guinean society. The design was based on modular principles inherited from a standardised approach, while the project brief recommended, as far as the construction and decoration of the buildings were concerned, “that […] the customary motifs and materials of the different regions be applied”.
     Schiappa de Campos’ work at the GUU also meant that he got to travel to the overseas territories. In 1959-60 he travelled to Portuguese Guinea with the architect António Seabra, where he photographed the different habitats of the region that was to become Guinea Bissau. He was inspired in this project by the pioneering work carried out by Orlando Ribeiro in 1947 (published in his Report on the Physical and Human Geography Study Expedition to Guinea). His research work on this expedition also contributed, in 1970, to a report by the Overseas Investigation Board entitled Traditional Habitats of Portuguese Guinea, which illustrated the type of research the Portuguese were involved in and observed international recommendations on indigenous habitats.
     Within the context of the work of the Planning and Housing Services Directorate (DSUH), which reported to the Directorate General for Public Works and Communications (at the MU) and replaced the GUU in 1957, he provided consultancy services in Mozambique in 1964 with Mário de Oliveira, helping in the assessment of 13 urban processes at the local Urbanisation Department. This collaboration was illustrative of the kind of work the DSUH carried out in the 1960s, when the requests for design projects supplied from Lisbon for the two largest overseas provinces, Angola and Mozambique, decreased. The two architects were roped in to help in the implementation of the Study Bases for Urbanisation Plans produced in Maputo in 1960, which transformed the “idealistic” guidelines in the document into more “realistic” solutions. Having returned from a study trip to Nigeria and Senegal, where he was able to observe the increasing migratory movements of rural population groups to the urban centres, placing pressure on the conventional city, he advocated the integration of the more spontaneous of the native settlements into the new Mozambican plans.
     At the end of the 1960s he travelled to Timor, where he designed one of his defining works: the Banco Nacional Ultramarino building in Dili and the housing for the bank’s employees. The building, one of the most expressive of the modernist culture of the colonial period built in the Timorese capital, is characterised by a linear layout that forms an L with the Casa do Gerente. The façades feature a horizontal and vertical brise-soleil structure to provide the indispensable shade. He also used his knowledge of tropical climates in the workers’ housing. Shunning mechanised air conditioning systems, he designed the residences so that they could rely solely on “their building elements”, as he wrote in the Binário magazine, which featured the design on the cover of one of its issues in 1969. While the functional aspects are resolved on plan, the section guaranteed the climatic aspects. The former bank premises have now been renovated.
     Designs like this one in Timor show that the modernist language was perfectly assimilated by this generation of architects, which favoured construction and functional aspects over stylistic details. In the case of Schiappa de Campos, this becomes clearer when one compares the designs he produced for the GUU and those he worked on at the same time outside the office, even on a cost-restricted basis. An exemplary case is the Cine-Teatro Virgínia in Torres Novas, built in 1956, which has an unquestionably modern profile. Arquitectura magazine featured the work the following year, together with the Cinema Avis by Maurício de Vasconcelos, both being highlighted for their sensible scale, colour, materials and lighting. In the specific case of the Cine-Teatro Virgínia, the magazine praised the quality of the principal theatre, conceived as “architecture in the service” of the community, with great “simplicity” of resources.
     After the Revolution in 1974, the MU ceased to exist. For a short while it became the Ministry of Interterritorial Coordination. Schiappa de Campos had by now transferred to the Study and Planning Office at the Ministry for Housing, Urban Planning and Construction (active from 1975 to 1978), which was responsible for housing and planning policies in the post-revolution period.
     He applied to teach at ESBAL, whose architecture course at the time was overseen by two influential figures: Frederico George and Formosinho Sanchez. He remained there from 1969 to 1980, teaching Architectural Design. He also continued to work independently on design projects from his own office in the Avenidas Novas in Lisbon. He is currently working on a book of the photographs he took in Portuguese Guinea on the 1959/1960 expedition.|