Raízes e caminhos: Marques da Silva e a arquitectura do século XX - Roots and paths: Marques da Silva and 20th century architecture

• Autor(a) principal: Rui Jorge Garcia Ramos
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Tipo de documento: Livro
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/62526
• topic: Arquitectura, Artes, Artes; Architecture, Arts, Arts

Roots and paths: Marques da Silva and 20th century architecture. (p.28-39) At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the architecture that spread across North and South America and Europe, from New York to Santiago to Chile, and from Paris to Istanbul, was marked by the desire for progress. At the end of the 19th century, Marques da Silva (1869-1947) completed his training as an architect at the École Nationale et Spéciale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he not only frequented the studio of Victor Laloux (1850- 1937) but also showed great admiration for Ferdinand Dutert (1845-1906), even to the point of claiming him to be his teacher, as was to be made more explicit later on. These two Frenchmen were both architects engaged in intense professional activity in a city that was alive with all manner of innovative large-scale projects, and Marques da Silva was to maintain close ties of loyalty with them throughout his life. In this way, his education in the canons of the Beaux Arts was augmented by a unique design-based experience that not only caused architects to revise the methodologies that they used for the conception and organisation of their production but also led them to incorporate new techniques for dealing with the construction requirements of large-scale spaces. At the same time, architects were equipped with detailed functional programmes for mass use and, above all, were able to share with the engineers a new multidisciplinary perspective of the architectural design. On his return from his stay in Paris in 1896, he immediately dedicated himself to significant projects, such as the São Bento railway station (1896-1911), designed to give greater dignity to the rail service, with the arrival of the first train in the centre of Porto taking place that same year, or the building of the workers' housing estate of "O Comércio do Porto" (1899), where he was faced with the serious problem of providing low-cost housing in the city, which was to become the central theme of 20th- century architecture. The proposal that he presented for the São Bento station clearly demonstrates the firm conviction that he had at the beginning of his activity as an architect. On the one hand, this project included the technical challenges presented by the circulation of trains, the large number of passengers that they carried, and the problem of telecommunications. In sketch after sketch, the balance that he had to negotiate between monumentality and functionality ended up relegating to a secondary position the presence in the main façade of the metal structure designed to support the large glassed area surrounding the platforms. On the other hand, the development of the project displayed his firm belief in progress, clearly expressed in the indispensable nature of this work, which led to the inevitable completion of the demolition of the Convento de São Bento de Avé Maria and its church, to redesign the city centre in keeping with the new times.