Architecture

Sergio Fernandez — in memoriam

Pedro Levi Bismarck

Reading Time10’

1.

There are men who are, to us — men with whom we had the chance to live, men from whom we had the chance to learn — men without death, incapable of dying.

The very idea of Sergio Fernandez’s death was, for that very reason, an inconceivable, if not absurd, notion. Perhaps that is why I found myself in the paradoxical position of postponing the possibility of a final meeting. And so, Sergio left us without ever having had the opportunity to thank him for the role he played throughout my education: from the first year of the Project course at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, through the period I worked at Atelier 15, but above all, in the last few years when we shared a deep affinity in our reading of a certain present state of the world, of architecture, and, of course, of the school.

The generosity with which Sergio accepted the invitation to present the book Architecture and “Pessimism”. On a political condition of architecture1 in October 2020, under the daunting and risky conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic, succinctly defines his character: his courage and his commitment not only to architecture, but to the city — or, rather, his commitment to architecture as an expression of a will to project [design] and will for the city. In short, a project for the city, a political project for the city, a project of political citizenship through architecture.

2.

If Sergio “saw himself primarily as an architect of the project,” as stated in the note published by the Marques da Silva Foundation following his passing, this does not refer to a project reduced to the technical conditions of the building’s construction, nor to an architect confined within the fixed boundaries of the drawing board. Rather, it points to this idea of Project — an idea of Architecture-as-Project — which recent decades have gradually come to call into question: an idea of architecture as a possibility of transforming place [lugar], one that, while accepting the natural limitations of a given circumstance, never ceased to challenge and shape them, always seeking a principle of formal continuity between what should remain and what might emerge. This principle of continuity never meant a tacit acceptance of existing conditions, nor any nostalgia for the past. And, for that very reason, it was never held hostage by any nostalgia for the future.

“Place” is, precisely, the defining — or perhaps even liminal — term of this mode of conceiving the project: not only because it was a matter of ensuring the resistance to the ongoing disfigurement of territory and life, finding within existing forms2 the capacity to withstand capitalist modernization’s destructive impulse, but because it was in and with place that architecture itself could resist the excessive utopia of the Will that the Project inherently and so destructively contained. The resistance of place was the means of constraining the pure, absolute, and tyrannical will that seemed to determine the fate of the modern project. From Fernando Távora to Álvaro Siza, by way of Sergio: this was always the cultural and political function that the place performed and that defined the school — even though the school, over the years and so ironically, ended up reducing it to a merely formal and aestheticized category. Place was always a problem of scale, to be sure, and Sergio’s work reveals this succinctly: but on that scale, the proper relationship between parts was a matter of both form and politics.

The Leal Neighborhood (1974–76) — and Távora’s Vila da Feira Market (1953–59) and Siza’s São Vítor Neighborhood (1974–76) — are perhaps, the most eloquent expressions of this place of the project, but also of this project of place — a formulation as beautiful as it is contradictory, yet beautiful precisely because it is contradictory: a synthesis that, however, was never able to contain the unbridled advance of urbanization and the destruction of cities and the territory. There, in Leal, we are already alone, but we still have architecture.

These three works are, today, undoubtedly a testament to the solitude of architecture,3 yet they possess the indelible brilliance of a confident resistance in the face of a territory, but also of an architecture that is, today, for us, as incomprehensible as it is inhuman: or, perhaps, incomprehensible precisely because it is inhuman.

The utopia of the project — the faith in architecture’s ability to give Form and Plan to this new civilization of the machine, its capacity to halt the process of absolute deterritorialization inherent to capitalist modernization — defined the disciplinary and political horizon of twentieth-century architecture and turned the architect into what, in truth, he had never been: a technician and a public intellectual for whom the political question of the common good was the foremost principle of his métier. “Get closer to the centre of human reality and build its counterform — for each man and all men (today the architect is the ally of everyman or no man)”.4 The quote is from Aldo van Eyck, but it expresses with complete clarity the power of a legacy to which Sergio was deeply bound.

Fotografia da maqueta do Bairro Leal no gabinete da Brigada orientada pelo Arquitecto Sergio Fernandez
Bairro do Leal’s model in the brigade office ©Fundação Marques da Silva, Arquivo Sergio Fernandez

3.

It was precisely the dissolution of this notion of project — this neoliberal process of architecture’s privatization — that Sergio understood so well in Architecture and “Pessimism”. Because Sergio and Alexandre Alves Costa, with whom he worked for decades at Atelier 15, are precisely the clear and unequivocal manifestation of this figure of the public architect, the architect of the project, in opposition to the neoliberal figure — which reigns today — of the private or privatized architect, expropriated from his public status, but also from his disciplinary one. This is the object-architect, belonging to an architecture reduced to the pure objectivity of its formal relationships, converted into an object of poetic-dilettante enjoyment or into an object of endless technocratic apparatuses. In short, the sad and melancholic figure of an architect without a project, without a city, and without a place.

And it is in reference to a key statement by Giulio Carlo Argan in Progetto e destino — “One never projects for, but always against someone or something”5 — that Sergio will rightly say the following:6

“Architecture is not an abstract concept. It cannot be an abstract concept, something to be sacralized. Architecture has relationships; it has contexts. And that context is not merely physical; it is much more than that (…). I was, I would say, ‘lucky’— and it is a paradox to say this, I know — to have studied architecture in the midst of fascism, because we (…) were constantly against (…). We felt compelled, more than just to make drawings, to understand reality. Today’s broader context no longer calls for that rebellious attitude. And so, our refuge lies in that level of abstraction, that “navel-gazing.” The project is no longer a project; it is a response (…). “Political awareness — the awareness that politics is present in every action [of the architect] — is what’s missing, and it’s missing more and more (…). What I think is needed is for people to become aware, within the context they’re in, and see how they can be against, as Argan used to say.”

4.

There is, in fact, much to thank Sergio for: as a teacher and architect, but above all for the unconditional support he always made a point of showing toward what I have been writing — and which seems to have provoked so many misunderstandings in a class incapable of thinking for itself, insisting on the self-destructive worship of its own illusions and shutting itself off in provincial anti-intellectualism. Because, in truth, I have never written about anything other than the ruin of that world which he, Sergio, sought with such dedication to shape and build through Architecture. A lesson that, unfortunately, not everyone seems to have understood, not even those who claimed for themselves the status of disciples and heirs of the school and who, along the way, reduced the project to a mere “response” and place to a pure abstraction.

At the presentation in February 2025 of Alexandre Alves Costa’s latest book — in which I participated alongside José Manuel Pureza — Sergio asked me for the text of my presentation so he could read it again. The next day he replied, saying: “Dear Pedro: Thank you for sending me, as promised, the text you read at the presentation of Alexandre’s book. I’ve just read it and can confirm the accuracy and — why not say it — the beauty of its form and the importance of its content.

This text, which I titled “In Praise of the Masters, A Rejection of Their Disciples” ended exactly like this — and it was, as I now realize more clearly, my tribute to both Alexandre and Sergio:7

“A school is certainly made up of its masters. There is no school without masters. But the best masters have always been those who refused to be masters: who refused to be elevated to the status of masters. On the other hand, a school has never been made up of its disciples. And that was the illusion or the error that the institutionalization or canonization of the school brought with it: the belief that it could perpetuate itself through its disciples. The disciple may, in fact, love the master, but will never be able to understand him. That is why “tradition” and “treason” share a constitutive and etymological affinity (Latin tradere). For there to be tradition, there must be betrayal. There is a constitutive infidelity that only the true master can accept and that only one who does not wish to be a mere disciple can venture to commit. “Heritage is never a given, but always a task,” Jacques Derrida once wrote.»
  1. Pedro Levi Bismarck, Architeture and “Pessimism”. On the political condition of architecture. Stones against diamonds, Porto, 2020. The book launch took place in Porto, at Mala Voadora, on October 24, 2020, and it was attended by Sergio Fernandez, Carlos Machado, Bernardo Amaral, and Inês Beleza.
  2. One might say «vernacular forms of the existing», but in saying this, as professor and historian Carlos Machado explains, it would be essential to note Sergio’s stay in Rio de Onor between 1963 and 1965, in search of a kind of “primitive communism” that still survived in this communal village on the border of Trás-os-Montes. In any case, the search for the vernacular was not simply a search for form, but a search for a constitutive relationship between form and life. As Carlos Machado further adds: “for them, it was never a matter of inventing another reality, but of finding in what exists that which is worthwhile and fighting for it (just as one fights against that which is not worthwhile).” I am very thankfull to Carlos Machado for this decisive contribution to this discussion. Regarding Rio de Onor, see: Sergio Fernandez, “Rio de Onor 1963–1965” in Joelho magazine no. 2, 2011 [This texto will be soon published in Stones against Diamonds].
  3. Pedro Levi Bismarck, «A solidão da arquitectura (Mercado municipal de Santa Maria da Feira. 1953-1959)» [«The solitude of architecture (Santa Maria da Feira’s Municipal Market, 1953-1959)»] in Alexandre Alves Costa (ed.), Fernando Távora. Pensamento Livre, Fundação Marques da Silva, Porto, 2023.
  4. Aldo Van Eyck, «Beyond visibility», in For Us, 1963.
  5. Giulio Carlo Argan, Progetto e destino, Saggiatore, Milão, 1965.
  6. Sergio Fernandez intervention in Architecture and “Pessimism”.
  7. Pedro Levi Bismarck, «Elogio dos Mestres, Repúdio dos seus Discípulos». Book presentation, Argumentos 2. em convergência, Alexandre Alves Costa, Fundação Marques da Silva, February 12, 2025.