Outmoded Lesson

Abstract

This text was taken from a notebook by Francisco Barata dated July 2012. According to Mariana Sá, who is carrying out doctoral research on the work of the architect who died prematurely in 2018, these are notes for a lecture that were part of the material that Barata was accumulating and elaborating in view of the Prova de Agregação at Faup, an academic task that was actually carried out in February 2016. It is therefore not a finished text, with defined terms and program, but rather a text under construction from which inserts and notes have been omitted, windows open to hypothetical developments, which it might be interesting to analyse elsewhere but which in this publication would make reading and understanding the underlying concepts difficult and not very fluent.

Having said this necessary premise, it is important to add that this lecture, despite the freedom of concatenation of thoughts typical of an outline in search of a definitive form, is structured around three clearly identified concepts: on the didactics of architecture, on drawing, on the design process. As a transversal background to the three concepts and the reflection that connects them, there is a central question: what path should Porto’s school take, his school on the model and experience of which he reflects in the text, concluding, in the footsteps of Fernando Távora’s teaching, that the task of every “good professor is to be able to select and transmit what remains of ancient knowledge, to create restlessness, to open debates, new doors, new paths”.