The purpose of this text
The architect João Paulo Conceição, who died at the end of 2011, was a figure of note in academics, an educator and researcher, who also, as a professional architect, designed and realised a number of significant projects, amongst which the Lisbon Mosque (1978-1991) is of particular importance. One should also highlight, above all, across the many and varied activities he was involved in, the intensely human, ethical and eminently compassionate nature he revealed in all his deeds and actions. It is these traits that we remember most when we think of him.
Indeed, what the life and work of JPC mean – and this must be said ‘now’, at a time of general confusion and the loss or alteration of many of our values – is precisely his open, volunteering and positive attitude, across a range of activities, whether professionally (as a man who worked on collaborative projects and participated in teams and groups both in architectural design or research projects), or in education and divulgation of the profession (lecturing, publishing).
João Paulo Conceição was always imbued with an enterprising spirit; he was curious and exploratory. He also had a healthy and vigorous experimental streak. He was a motivator and enjoyed people, managing to bring out, discreetly but in its entirety, the best in everyone, and there were many who worked and collaborated with him.
The topic and/or question raised by the way he lived is no small matter: we consider it to be fundamental to affirm that, in the exercise of any qualified creative and professional activity (in this case, architecture), the intellectual dimension must always be, or ought to be, accompanied by strong connections with the many dimensions that complete us, our existence and our relations with others and the world: a sense of humanity, an emotional sensibility, a perception of values and an openness towards problems that present themselves, and solidarity as a way of being in life. Without this, the perfection of the work created, no matter how beautiful, solid and functional it is, will always be of a blemished, partial and relative worth.
That architects, in these days or in the future, may get a sense of this figure and his too short (as well as imperfect, certainly, if always coherent and solid) journey through life, impregnated simultaneously with these same human, profess-ional and fraternal values, is the clear and simple objective of this article.
A brief chronology of a journey through life
João Paulo Conceição was born in Setúbal in 1950, into a family traditionally involved in maritime-related profess-ions. He early on developed a taste for objects, mechanisms and the like. He moved to Coimbra in 1958, where he completed his secondary education. In 1969 he was involved in the academic crisis in Coimbra, subsequently applying to a course in architecture at the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon – ESBAL (1969-1970), managing to complete the course in 1976, having experienced the successive crises resulting from the political and education-related upheavals of the period.
Amongst these crises, the following stand out, listed in more or less chronological order: the symbolic happening known as the Enterro da Escola, an initiative of the ESBAL students following the university crisis that spread across the country; the ‘collective resignation’ of the group led by the architect Frederico George (which, according to Keil do Amaral, attempted sweeping reforms in the teaching of Architecture, but ‘too late’), suffocated by the direction of Joaquim Correia, during the time of Veiga Simão in the Ministry of Education, at the end of the “Marcelist Spring” in 1971-72; the crossing of the cultural and educational desert in which ESBAL found itself in 1973-74, with the police, based in the neighbouring building, called by the school governors to arrest certain of the protesting students in the corridors of the old convent of São Francisco; the abrupt end of the architecture course of in Lisbon, with the ‘organised’ students bursting into classrooms and removing the teachers on 26 April 1974, in a reaction to the previous repression; the ‘pedagogic experiment’ of the self-appointed, organised groups, including the RGA (General Students Meeting) and intense political debates, in 1975, until the reinstallation of a new Department of Architecture in 1976-77.
Conceição worked in the firm of Keil do Amaral (1910-1975) together with José Antunes da Silva (1928-1996) from 1969 to 1977. Alongside this work, he undertook projects in the graphic arts, in 1973, and collaborated with Walfredo Sangareau de la Cavalleria (until 1978). It is during this phase, also, that he started to work independently, as the managing architect at the GAT/Local Technical Office in Seia, in 1975-77. From 1981 onwards he lived and worked in Coimbra and Lisbon. In 1983 he participated in the controversial and provocative exhibition Depois do Modernismo (After Modernism). From then on he began teaching (which he continued until 2010), at the Ricardo Espírito Santo Silva Foundation (interior design and also restoration and rehabilitation of interiors), as well as the Escola Superior de Educação in Coimbra. In 1990-92 he was a monitor for the Traditional Arts and Crafts Programme, overseeing the brick vaulting course in Serpa, in collaboration with the Town Council. In 1997 he was invited to lecture at ARCA/ Ensino Superior de Tecnologias Artísticas in Coimbra.
In 1992 he was included in the Portuguese representation at the Límite del Mar exhibition in Madrid (for which the author of this text designed the Architecture Exhibition). For the catalogue of this exhibition, he chose two quotations with which he identified in some way: “It is wild, and even brutal, but it is healthy, it is sincere, and it is ours!’ (Miguel Torga); ‘It is always the same blue, the same drop, the same giddiness…’ (Samuel Beckett). The work displayed included three pieces by Conceição, all collaborations: the Lisbon Mosque, the branch of the CGD bank in Cuba/Alentejo and the design for the Fumamar factory in Setúbal.
In the exhibition Il Portogallo del Mare, delle Pietre, delle Città/Portugal of Sea, Stone and Cities, which was the official Portuguese entry in the 19th International Exhibition of Architecture at the Milan Triennale in 1996 (which I came to commission with the assistance of João Vieira Caldas, under the initiative of the Ministry of Culture), Conceição was also represented with the Fumamar factory design, now revised (1991-92, with Diogo Vieira), which he presented in intense colours in drawings and a scale model.
The critical text by Alexandre Alves Costa in the exhibition catalogue examines the questions that motivate the entirety of Conceição’s work, in the context of a number of new proposals for the city:
Labyrinth, in architecture, means a succession of autonomous spaces of an unexpected nature, leading from surprise to surprise until the end of a journey of unimaginable conclusion. [...] In Portugal [...] the dominant axis may be cut by others which deviate from the norm, making a single interpretation difficult. Different rationalities, often, get mixed up: those resulting from the symbolic or liturgical rules of interior spaces may be in opposition to others which take recourse to needs for urban or landscape integration. [...] Breaking the dominant rationality, giving form to shifting rationalities, defending the right to subjectivity, producing manifestos, placing oneself even on the side of bad taste or bad habits, of less worthy or ephemeral architecture, of symbolic or metaphorical architecture, is a treacherous path to take, one only made bearable if supported by a great purity or new, intensely active and militant ideology, attentive, and simultaneously aggressive and defensive, so that one does not remain in the limbo of restlessness of the artist with high market standing. The architects [Manuel] Graça Dias and Egas [José] Vieira, [João] Santa Rita, João Paulo Conceição and [António] Marques Miguel, are anything but a homogenous group. They are, together, a labyrinth within the labyrinth of Lisbon.1
Between 1992 and 1996 Conceição created for the Belém Cultural Centre the designs for the exhibitions Arquitecto Luís Barragán, casas acariciadoras/Arquitectura rural mexicana, Alvarez Bravo/Retrospectiva de fotografia, and also, A magia da imagem/A viagem do pré-cinema, within the ambit of AZIMUTE, working with Diogo Vieira and Manuel Lacerda.
In 1998 he founded 9H-Arquitecturas Associadas, ‘his’ architectural practice.
Some more noteworthy designs and works
Early on in his independent professional activity, Conceição won first prize in the competition for the design of the Lisbon Mosque 2.
Today, a quarter of a century later, with the benefit of time and hindsight, one can better understand that the Mosque project was, in Lisbon, the most potent, innovative and imaginative example of a design approach from within post-modernity, a cultural process that was germinating internationally, in the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s, before the emergence of the vulgar Lisbon post-modern in a formalist-consumerist deviations by other authors in the mid-1980s, propagated in commercial and mass housing projects.
Conceição’s design for the Lisbon Mosque was the result of a vision at once restrained and subdued, but informed, shaped and inspired by its theme, absorbed and recreated in a culturally incisive interpretation. It was subsequently realised in a monument which dynamically exploited the dimensional qualities of an uninspiring location, facing north and practically suburban. It is a homogenous and expressive building in its shapes, colours and textures, as is guaranteed by its simple palette of organic, specifically-chosen materials – with no concessions of any kind to neo-vernacular populism or an effusive, rhetorical modernity – both ever-present dangers that surrounded the whole project.
The Lisbon Mosque remained an incomplete work in relation to its original concept; from time to time it was threatened by spurious or difficult-to-control alterations, but, to a great extent due to the strength of the initial design, it has maintained its integrity of place, body and form.
The enticing challenge of producing an object beyond our models of reference is even more fascinating whenever fused with our own distant and profound origins as an ethno-cultural entity. 700 years after the Almorávidas abandoned the south of this land, in Lisbon an ‘icon’ is once again born as an emblematic testament to the keepers of its faith. The codex, at once formalist and normative, censoring and liberal, lays the foundations for the structural options of a practice in Lisbon, even if, through the formal proposal, the memory of times past is maintained indissoluble and continued. From the defining emphaticisation, the presence of the void and the telluric formal analogy, in the Kaaba (‘Cube’), all is brought together – with the light entering through the window slats, with the brilliant, luminous reflections of the tiles and stucco finishes, the raw and burnt earth walls reflecting its unadorned origins – the desert.
But not just the forms and what they more immediately transmit are dealt with.
A relationship is sought between what they represented and the physical knowledge the the culture of the time (empirical or not) provided, the materials that were available and the construction methods used, the iconographic and mystical representations they carried, the spirituality they emanated and transmitted – and it is precisely this spirituality which it is imperative to recapture, referencing a New World, a new reality which reverberates with another time, with other social, political and economic structures, with new periods of production, new ways of building and new raw materials. The aim is to achieve all this without disrespecting a philosophical and spiritual genesis. And to manage to re-establish a truth and a reality that are as different as they are close to us, in time and space.’3
From the 1980s, one can highlight the Caixa Geral de Depósitos branch in Cuba, Alentejo4. In volumetric and formal terms it can be seen in the context of the ‘southern culture’ themes explored in the Mosque – the great cubic box of the body, very clear in its urban presence, opening onto the street, and topped by the semi-sphere of the dome, the outer shell of which is covered with ‘glass crystal’, providing a refracting and plastically differentiating effect.
The softness of the south. The ochre sea as far as the eye can see beyond behind kermes oak work and, further back in time, the indomitable permanence of a heritage, and the miscegenation and exchange of beliefs, ways of life and traditions, in the formal continuity that the sun and its latitudes have created.
The urbe, the continuation of an understanding of quest and of ancestral roots. A new object which does not aim for the spurious, but rather a purity of formal elements, synthesis and symbol of another time and space, not of conquest, but of surrender to, and for, open people, in simple and contemporary forms – cubic volumes and spherical flourishes –, dialogues of light in the shade of exact outlines, ambivalent connections between exterior and interior, up to the prismatic zenithal crowning, for the journey.5
In the 1990s, the search for other forms of plasticity and other languages became visible in Conceição’s work, exemplified by the recourse to elements of architectural history rooted in modernity and industrial forms in the design for the Fumarmar factory in Setúbal6. This is an object which, without losing its connection to the sea and nature, establishes this in an ‘objectualised’ fashion, through articulations, joints, chimneys and mechanisms, united by a vibrant backdrop of red and grey, and with an internal space that in a way evokes the (metaphorical) logic of the engine. It is also evocative of a nostalgic time gone, an epic poem about its surroundings:
There is a mythical enchantment to the sea. A poetic magic, historic and calming. Our enchantment. There is an object – a reference to memories of childhood where our grandfather used to reveal the sea to us and taught us to look at the sunset. There is a permanent trace of a smell, bitter and sweet, the strident screech of the gulls and the throb of machinery. An intoxicating and painful journey at first, frenetic and eager by its conclusion, with dolphins in the estuary, the sounds and memory of form. Forms of living, feeling, exchange, giving and receiving.7
A relatively unique project in the context of his work, but one of great depth and rigour in its conception, is the restoration, remodelling and conversion of an original 16th century manor house in Viana do Castelo to a hotel( 1997), in which the dignification of its dense Manueline forms transitioning into the Renaissance style involves a careful new ‘architecture of comfort’ for its interior spaces..
In the “Pátio das Janelas Verdes”8 development, in which the measured fluidity of common and connecting spaces on the ground level and upper floors is allied with a clearly defined articulation with the discreet landscaping, expressed in the communal patio space facing the riverfront, and a successful and detailed ‘theory of interior space’ on an intimate scale, whether in the flexibility of the room division and the vaulted ceilings, or in the appropriate selection of materials, colours and textures, managing at the same time to attune the domestic spatiality to the reading of the dramatic waterfront.
From the most recent decade, as his final projects9, one should mention the works designed for Parque Escolar, particularly the remodelling and extension of the D. Filipa de Lencastre complex (the old modernist secondary school by Jorge Segurado plus two adjoining schools), at Arco do Cego in Lisbon10.
Beyond all the controversy generated by this type of programme, the work on the Filipa de Lencastre school reflects the extreme care in the working with the ample space and ‘luxurious’ modernist materials of the existing structure (renovation of floor coverings and marble walls of the extended atrium), in the quest for a new level of internal comfort (in the redesign of classrooms, new spaces and circulation circuits) and the enhancement of new areas and functions (the creation of a further indoor sports level and an Auditorium in the central patio).
A final reference should be made to his preferred and constant method of production, (whether in research, design, architecture or publishing): that of collaboration, always being open to experimentation, with other colleagues. We have mentioned some of those with whom he worked: António Maria Braga, Diogo Vieira, Manuel Gomes da Costa, Manuel Lacerda, Miguel Pimentel. There are others who also should be mentioned, including the writer of these lines – and in that context, the most lasting and productive work relationship he had, in the fields of research and publishing, that with Hélder Carita. |
1 Alexandre Alves Costa. in Portugal: do mar, das pedras, da cidade/Portugal of Sea, Stone and Cities. Lisboa : Ministério da Cultura; GRI – Gabinete de Relações Internacionais, 1996, p. 24-26.
2 With António Maria Braga [design: 1978-1989; construction work: 1980-1991; opened (Phase 1): 1985; Developer: Lisbon Islamic Community].
3 João Paulo Conceição. in Límite del Mar. Madrid, [s.n.], 1992.
4 With Miguel Pimentel (design: 1985-1986; construction work: 1986-1988).
5 João Paulo Conceição. In op. cit.
6 With Diogo Vieira (design: 1991-1992; unbuilt).
7 João Paulo Conceição. in Portugal do Mar, das Pedras, da Cidade/Portugal of Sea, Stone and Citeis. Lisboa : Ministério da Cultura; GRI – Gabinete de Relações Internacionais, 1996, p. 121.
8 With Manuel Gomes da Costa (project and work: 2004-2007).
9 In full collaboration with Manuel Gomes da Costa between 2007 and 2010.
10 In addition to similar design projects for Infanta D. Maria Secondary School in Coimbra and for D. Luísa de Gusmão Secondary School in Lisbon.