How Fiction Works.
A Conversation with Eduardo Souto de Moura
by Inmaculada Maluenda y Enrique Encabo
Text published in El Croquis 218 Eduardo Souto de Moura 2015 2023
My family lived behind that grove of trees in the distance, heading towards the centre of town. The Italian School of Porto, where I studied, was nearby, and so was the pavilion where I’d go to watch the field hockey games against Spain. In summer, we’d go down to the beach at the mouth of the Douro; the water is so cold there that it’s like a gin and tonic. We’d have picnics there and my father, who was a doctor, would stop by to see us on his way to the office. He’d come by without taking off his shoes or his suit, and after a bit, he’d be off again, saying, "Goodbye, I’m leaving; I don’t like the sand".
I still remember the day&mdashI must have been about five or six years old&mdashwhen I went with my parents and siblings to watch them install the central piece of the Arrábida bridge. It arrived on these huge barges and from there they lifted it, using traditional methods.
One of my first jobs was in that modern little house on the riverbank, which is now a restaurant. It was the construction office for the bridge until 1963, when the construction finished. Then it became the headquarters of the road construction company where my uncle worked. By that time, I had finished secondary school. I was 17 years old, and I wanted to travel and buy myself a car before starting at the university. Architecture was still housed in the Fine Arts building, near rua das Fontainhas. I had thought about working with an architect to earn some money, but since they paid very little, I gave private lessons in descriptive geometry instead. Seeing that I was relatively skilled in drawing, my uncle, who was also my godfather, offered me a summer job in his office drawing the braces, the plan views and other details for the bridges they were building. We worked on graph paper, and I sat very close to his table, with views of the Douro. With the salary I earned I was able to buy a car, and I pulled up for the first day of university with my arm resting on the window. The other students thought I was rich, and they said: "That Eduardo must be a fascist!"
Talking with Eduardo Souto de Moura (Porto, 1952) means accepting unpredictability: an outpouring of stories, memories, quotes, jokes, repetitions of history and, above all, digressions. It’s worth paying attention to those tangents. A brief shared walk to the river, on the way to lunch, was enough to bring up a memory of the place.
It might well seem that, like Aldo Rossi, whom he admired so greatly, Eduardo Souto de Moura has ended up merging his life and work, despite the fact that he never showed the slightest intention of separating the two. Rossi, in his Scientific Autobiography&mdashpublished in 1981, when he had just turned 50&mdashwrote that, from a certain point in life, he had begun to consider craft or art to be a description of things and of ourselves. It’s harder to find that boundary line in the case of Souto de Moura. He recognized as much in his own writings about his life, a playful response to the Milanese architect, which he titled 'A (not so) Scientific Autobiography'. Between the lines, Souto de Moura admitted the, not at all tragic, paradox that he seems to share with the author of The Architecture of the City: a stalwart defence of the autonomy of the discipline, along with its acceptance as an enormous repository of human toil. To put it in Rossi’s words: "the building, in order to correspond to the changes of life, had to fabricate life and be fabricated out of it".