Architetti, architettura

The idea that their purpose is to change the appearance of the world by not being part of it percolates through countless micro-fractures in the culture of architects. Nothing could be further from the way of thinking and working of Eduardo Souto de Moura. “For fourteen years, I have been designing the same house, as if it were an obsession. But although the houses are always the same, they are different, because the places and people deserve it” writes Souto de Moura on one page of this book. House, of course, is a synecdoche: a part for the whole. And Souto de Moura speaks of his whole world in the writings collected here: of his projects, of his reading that returns on every page of his masters, Álvaro Siza and Fernando Távora above all, of the architects he favours, such as Jacques Herzog and Rafael Moneo, but in the persistent shadow of Mies van der Rohe and Aldo Rossi. How is one an architect? How is the profession of architect practised? How to select in the endless background of history everything that is still part of your work? These are the questions raised in Architetti, architecture, which, often unsettling, is not addressed to architects alone.

Translated from the Portuguese by Elisa Pegorin.