“ ARCHITECT , sm (the word derives from the Gr. Arkhitékton utterance composed by the prefix arkh, which means master, ordainer and the noun tékton, which means artisan, craftsman and builder, or even mason and carpenter) Architect is one who exercises, in master quality, the art of building, drawing up plans and supervising building plans. Thus, it designs the building, controls the construction phases, observes the needs of the useful and the satisfaction of human desires, whether these mean ontological, aesthetic or ethical orders. He ensures that the constructions are adapted and, corresponding to the demands of perfection, they also organically fulfill the useful purpose so that the construction has a practical purpose. So, duration, comfort, beauty and safety are your concerns. In the action of building, whether through plans, that in actual construction, or through the ideas he proposes, the architect builds and reorders the world. Since the Renaissance, a theorizing capacity has encompassed the profession of the Architect and thus the formulation of a treatise accompanied the emergence of a classical taste. In this way, the profession evolves from the direct practice of construction to more erudite levels of intervention. (…) the beginning of the 20th century, in which a new activity, that of city planner, was added to the practical form, including complex orders in which the architect continues to be the arkh-master. The aforementioned complexity obliges the architect to take an interdisciplinary action, in the same way that the intervention of new materials and the use of different construction systems direct their training to orders that, having artistic practice as their fulcrum, convert them into an interpreter of social loads, but also in the Being that brings together collective aspirations, aesthetic intentions and makes them apparent in architectural form and urban dynamics”
In Technical and Critical Vocabulary of Architecture, Maria João Madeira Rodrigues, Pedro Fialho de Sousa and Horácio Manuel Pereira Bonifácio - Quimera 2002
Faced with the eternal question of what is good and bad architecture, I subscribe to the opinion that good architecture results from the adequacy of solutions to the problems imposed.
A work of architecture is all the better the more adjusted the response to the problems it faces, which are immense: functional, climatic, structural, formal, psychological, social, financial, technological, etc.
Architecture is solving problems! Its evaluation is made by use and time. It is here that Architecture distances itself from Art, because Art does not have to solve problems – it is born only from the will to be and is unlimited.
Delfim Marques
(14.09.2011)
