Alessandro Mendini, 2001

The part of Tomás Taveira's work that I knew before belongs to his first cycle of creativity, and was elaborated under Post-Modernism. Not only his written work and theoretic ideas, but also his visual proposals, signs, materials and the architectural composition of his buildings originate in the linguistic freedom that was finally conceded under the school of Post-Modernism. In those days I visited Taveira's buildings with him, and we talked about his historical references and about the characters of exuberance and expressive generosity upon which he based his aesthetic research. I also remember some amusing polychrome furniture, and some wooden sculptures that were elegantly exaggerated in their colours. And I also remember the decorative detail of his architecture, applied with great deftness and imagination inside the perimeter - which was very vast indeed - of the jargon of international Post-Modernism and Neo-Modernism of the time. Times have changed. That cultural perimeter has been broken down everywhere, international architecture research has been fragmented, and the languages, the techniques and the instances have changed very, very much. Post-Modernism is still valid in its basic theories but no longer in its linguistic practice. Today everything is more subtle, more refined, more mature. There no longer exists a manneristic system of styles, but each and every architectural problem has become more substantial. And here is where the new, second cycle of Taveira begins, he being highly sensitive to transformations in figurative culture. In the times of his Post-Modernism, I was fascinated by Taveira's virtuosity in playing with his compositional abilities. It was the Taveira who was the official architect of a large bourgeois metropolis, capable of bestowing a strong image upon his city with projects that were big and sometimes very big. Now I see a new story in him, one that is just as fascinating. Taveira has matured other, different and new characteristics. I see a very articulate aesthetic language that has matured in him, where he confronts himself directly with pictorial art and its great eighteenth century tradition. From historical avant-garde to today. This is what continues to interest me in Taveira: his unstoppable visual imagination that makes an architect parallel to a painter, in their endless research. An architect-painter who is a painter-architect, who in any case has a base as a true constructor.

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