ABSTRACT
Tomás Taveira is the prime mover and an unavoidable name of postmodernism in the panorama of Portuguese architecture to this day. However, his path began in the last fifty years through an inkling that emerged from the political and social turmoil of that time, adjusted in an enormous curiosity about the English brutalist movement mixed with a great fascination related to the period of Italian architecture that encompasses the Renaissance and the Baroque (Cinquecento/Seicento). This historical-temporal bipolarity was transfigured in his works. Since then, these two influences have followed him throughout his career, where he has operated incessantly in very particular investigations and buildings about the sensations of space present in architecture. His work is research on an incessant transfiguration – a metamorphosis with no end in sight. Although architecture is the petrification of a period, this architect refuses to be domesticated by the space related to his time, permanently confronting it in a “work in progress” without, however, refusing its origin. Interestingly, this beginning had a fracturing character and was presented in a small store in Cascais—Valentim de Carvalho’s record store—with the collaboration of a painter and a poet who were his peers. The approaches related to space and time in his work are the main argument in this paper, where it will be shown that his ideas are not circumscribed to a normative and much less carry a regularity within the Portuguese socio-cultural context. Surprisingly, although his vast professional career has always been subject to aesthetic-formalistic modifications, its matrix remains the same, although everything else has changed over time, particularly the configurations and times of space.
