From Royaumont to Caxinas: Fernando Távora and the Response to the Complexity of Reality

• Main Author: Rui Seco
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Athens Institute for Education and Research 2020-04-01
• Series: Athens Journal of Architecture
• Online Access: https://www.athensjournals.gr/architecture/2020-6-2-3-Seco.pdf

Returning from the Royaumont Team 10 meeting, in 1962, Portuguese architect Fernando Távora published in the journal ‘Arquitectura’ his testimony, as observer in the encounter, reporting the impossibility of consensus between the participants. With somewhat disappointment, Távora related the big difference from the Charte d’Athénes era, three decades earlier, and expressed that “a formal conclusion, similar to that remarkable document, is absolutely impossible, almost foolish”. Although he considered indispensable to achieve operative ideas that could synthesize and guide architectural practice, he stated that “times and dimensions have changed... Reality is more diverse (...) Knowledge about mankind has increased, societies phenomena are beginning to be understood, and simultaneously everything gets more complicated. It is a time of doubt and research, of drama and mystery (...), not a time to conclusions.” These questions permeated throughout the intense program of the meeting. As Candilis presented his 25,000 dwellings masterplan for Toulouse, Coderch objected that for a single house he required six months to develop a project, moment that, according to Fernando Távora, synthesized the zeitgeist of the meeting. One decade later, Álvaro Siza, a former disciple of Távora, developed his plan for a small group of houses in Caxinas. A number of critics and historians state that there is a radical transformation in Portuguese city in the early 1970s. One of these authors, Paulo Varela Gomes, sustains that Caxinas is the turning point in that transformation. This article intends to perceive this change and to identify how the absence of references and absolute certainties, in that time of doubt and research, led to a new way of thinking and designing the city. Could this be read as an answer to Távora’s concerns about the lack of a conclusion in Royaumont?