Fernando Lanhas Information System
Fernando Lanhas, Monte de Santa Justa, Valongo Mountains, [1990s]. Photograph by Pedro Lanhas.
"I dreamed that I knew everything, that I had gained the knowledge of things, of the reason for existing."
Fernando Lanhas, 13-14 November 1973
Fernando Resende da Silva Magalhães Lanhas (1923-2012) is a polyhedral figure. A gentleman with an unusual personality and a permanent restlessness, he transformed his wish to understand the mysteries of art and life and his strong sense of abstraction in condition into a powerful instrument of knowledge and action to be exercised over the real and the concrete. An architect by training, he exercised an intense artistic activity, particularly recognised in the field of painting and drawing, but he left an extensive body of work that reflects the multiplicity of fields and interests in which he always moved. In an incessant search to understand the world and the forces which rule the Universe, from micro to macro scale, between Science and Art, he went beyond architecture and the plastic arts to disciplinary fields as diverse as archaeology, astronomy, museology, ethnology and botany. Poetry and the recording of dreams, also present in this constellation, represented, in turn, escape routes into a dream dimension shaped to the taste of his imagination. He was also an inveterate collector, multiplying his attention to objects as diverse as fossils, pebbles, sands from various parts of the world, rocks, toys and labels.
A modern architect from Porto, Fernando Lanhas developed, throughout approximately five decades (1940s-1990s), architectural work which synthesises in a singular form the values of his period, albeit acculturated and adjusted to the locations and dictating circumstances. Having attended the Porto School of Fine Arts between 1941 and 1947, he gained his Architectural Degree with a design for a Museum, in 1963. However, his professional activities began in the late 1940s, with Fernando Távora, the colleague with whom he collaborated on designs such as the house in the Rua do Vilar (1946), a nursery for Tomar (1947), the house for Bernardo Ferrão (1950) and the Feira Market (1954). He was also a member of the Organisation of Modern Architects (ODAM), being, with a design for a residential building in Porto, one of the 21 architects represented in the Architecture Exhibition of 1951 (Porto Commercial Athenaeum) and of 1952 (Aveiro). Muliple projects mark a discrete pathway, but one of intrinsic quality, containing houses, including his own home, residential blocks and public buildings, which accompany and help to give shape to the expansion of the city of Porto, in particular during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the study of and for museums - a visible sign of the growing importance of this sphere of personal interest, well expressed in the 1970s and 1980s. An architecture in which the human informs and shapes, denoting an urban consciousness and a search for the right balance between conventional, ordinary life and the possibilities of renewal dictated by the time in which it takes place.
The professional archive of Fernando Lanhas, donated to the Marques da Silva Foundation, consists of the documentary record of around one hundred and fifty architectural designs, by the panels he made to obtain his architect´ s degree, by approximately two hundred books and periodicals, as well as by diverse files relating to subjects as varied as museology, archaeology, astronomy, ethnography, heritage, press clippings and loose documents. The reception process began in 2018, associated with the programming of a series of initiatives coordinated by Professors Luís Viegas and Rui Américo Cardoso, namely Dialogues with Fernando Lanhas, and the exhibition e-Announcing Fernando Lanhas: Topics in his Drawings, during the opening session of which the Donation Agreement signing ceremony took place.
With the integration of this archive, it will become possible to systematically and comprehensively investigate this less studied dimension of Fernando Lanhas and, by accessing the information until now unpublished, to trace the distinctive style of creating architecture by this enthusiast of learning, recognising and revealing.
Although available for face-to-face consultation, the archive is at this moment undergoing technical treatment, but available to the public on the FIMS Digital Archive. It will soon be available to the public for consultation of the bibliographical list, on the Aleph platform.
Biographical note
See provisional list of works
