EDUARDO SOUTO DE MOURA  Architecture has to move with the times, it needs power and, fundamentally, money: it is always dependent on circumstances. My first opportunity to work in architecture was with Siza, on housing association work for SAAL¹, where I contributed significantly to those three houses in São Vítor. We practically lived on the spot. It was exciting for a young student: both the architecture, and the transformation of a new country. And that partly explains why I signed up to the modernist movement. There was a certain thirst for modernity – using pilotis was almost a manifesto and Corbusier’s Five Points were a kind of left-wing textbook. So there was this dream of building a new country on a micro-geographical scale which was SAAL. But that was followed by great disillusionment, politically, not with SAAL as such. When I saw that the houses were going to the association’s leaders, I suffered my first political shock from the left. Later, in the early eighties, a whole new and fresh middle class emerged, looking for houses. I started doing this sort of building and I needed a supporting language.

ESDM  I believed in what the modern movement wanted. Portugal needed fifty hospitals to be built, half a million houses. But at the same time, there was all that post-modernist euphoria in Europe and in Lisbon. In my view, the tool we needed to build those half a million houses was the modern movement, and not pediments and columns. There wasn’t the money for it. Within the modern movement it was Mies that interested me, because he was the most technically minded: he invented a system of building. That was something that had to be done in Portugal. But we couldn’t use cement, or iron, because either we didn’t have it or it was too expensive. I worked with stone not out of any sympathy for the vernacular, but because the building contractor for the Braga market put me straight: ‘There’s no money for concrete, if you like, we can do it in stone, we’ve no shortage of stone.’ So I started working with stone for a pragmatic reason: it was cheaper. But at the same time, it seemed to make sense to make use of architectural fakery, which was all the rage at the time. And so I started to work with simulations, using the representation of the materials and the walls. And that abstract architecture made just out of walls – in essence, a neoplastic support – provided me with a certain method for architectural design. Then there were technical constraints and it was a bloodbath of extremely expensive and entirely fake details. Well, architecture is all dissimulation. This was not what repelled me ethically, but it started to be something contra natura, stripped of that initial pragmatism.

ESDM  Precisely. With the Burgo Tower [1991] I went from one to twenty-three storeys. I’d never done a lift. And it was necessary to find another theme. It was then that I met [Jacques] Herzog. We were both teaching at Harvard. He had already gone through all those phases and had his finger on the cultural pulse. I had to design a tower, but it couldn’t be a neoclassical tower. And so I thought: ‘We’re living in the age when mechanics and technology rule supreme, and so it makes sense to do something along the lines of Herzog and the conversations I had with him, what he called mechanistic accumulation.’ That’s how I designed that overlapping set of pieces that together made up the Burgo Tower. I will always make sure the architecture offers a concrete response to a problem in particular circumstances. There’s no choice but to go along with the conditions in which architecture is produced. In this sense, an architect is an opportunist: he has to seize opportunities, classify them, judge them, analyse them. Architects have to understand reality. Reality has changed and I have changed over time.

ESDM  There is an accommodation, of course. But above all, there’s a degree of reflection on the consequences of the Bouro project. Bouro is a manifesto because it stands in opposition to the methodology of [Fernando] Távora. Restoration always seeks out a specific century. Távora chose the nineteenth century. But I asked myself: ‘Why do I have to choose the nineteenth century? I’m in the twentieth century, I’m going to do it in the twentieth century way!’ And so I don’t actually have to reinstate a century. I have to make a building with the stones at my disposal. ‘Bouro is a new building made with old stones’, is how the design specifications start. But the downside was that this became fashionable. And I started to see lots of buildings being decapitated – pretending to be modern – where the roofs were taken off. I didn’t want to be modern, I wanted to keep the ruin. And I later regretted what I had set in motion. I eventually understood that heritage is not an object, it’s a geography, an environment, an atmosphere. And that was precisely what I liked when I arrived in the Barrocal: an environment. I read up about the Barrocal region, including José Cutileiro’s thesis [Rich and Poor in the Alentejo], which is precisely the history of the Barrocal. At the time I thought: ‘I can’t rebuild this because there are no bakeries, no ironsmiths, no poverty; but the buildings fit into the landscape in a way that won’t change.’ But how do you build an environment? It’s like in the theatre, you design the sets. I made walls in concrete, because everything was falling down. And I wasn’t going to use adobe bricks because they’ll just collapse again. But what I wanted was to understand the texture and the feel of the adobe, and so I created that simulation of concrete clad in adobe, like make-up. Which I felt wasn’t bad. I like it, and the you don’t really notice the architect’s hand. In all this, there’s a consequence – probably because I’m seventy years old – which is that I’ve seen the state the country’s in. And please don’t tell me it’s not the architects...