Authored by Domingos Tavares, Professor Emeritus at FAUP, the book ‘Cidade de Pedra’ will be presented next Thursday 17th October at 9.30pm at the Passos Manuel Cinema in Porto. The publication focuses on the history of the city, stone and the people who have given it meaning throughout the ages, covering several millennia of occupation and urban construction.

With a presentation by the author, the session will be accompanied by dozens of historical photographs and original drawings that give visual meaning to the words in the book.

‘Cidade de Pedra’ is co-edited by Dafne Editora and CEAU-FAUP with the support of Porto City Council.

Synopsis

Granite is the stone that gives colour to the city of Porto. Ever since the first communities settled on the banks of the River Douro, on the rocky slopes on the way to the mouth of the largest river basin in the Iberian Peninsula, this place has been permanently inhabited. Following the model of Phoenician trading posts, the castro gave way to the Roman city and there are fragments that allow us to glimpse how these origins of settlement were the matrix of an episcopal borough, which in turn was consolidated into a bourgeois city. On the river beaches of Ribeira and Miragaia, shipbuilding and international trade, the privileged relationship with the ocean forged a culture that never ceased to expand within the framework of European civilisation. And at every moment of this process, through the desire and fortune of its inhabitants, rich and modest houses wove complex relationships with the topography of the place. The monuments and street layouts staged powerful perspectives and surprising images. Architecture shaped the city and was the matrix of its identity.

This book reconstructs an urban history of Porto based on the building practices that shaped it. It looks at the architectural vestiges that remain in order to interpret the constructive genius of those who gradually imagined and reinvented the city during the long gestation period. The portrait that emerges is that of a coherent whole, capable of absorbing its own contradictions, successes and failures, realising that the ambitions and expectations of each era naturally become transitory, but incorporate and consolidate a singular formal unity. The architecture and history of Porto, concatenated in the pages of this book, are the expression of this common culture.

Domingos Tavares (Ovar, 1939) is an architect and Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, where he taught since 1985 the subject that gave rise to Sebentas de História da Arquitectura Moderna, published by Dafne Editora between 2003 and 2014. He is the author of a wide range of books such as Da Rua Formosa à Firmeza (FAUP, 1985), Francisco Farinhas: Realismo Moderno (Dafne, 2007) and André Soares, Arquitecto tardobarroco (Dafne, 2020).