Three buttons on the sleeves. United States 1960 and Távora’s strangeness

Abstract

Fernando Távora, an architect and a teacher from northern Portugal, won a scholarship to visit a set of architectural education institutions. He left on the 13 of February of 1960, America was dealing with the crude consequences of post-war territorial strategies. The set of drawings, texts and other chartaceous resources that form the diary of Távora’s journey constitute a composite work of essential value to a greater understanding, not only of his career as an architect, professor and thinker, but also to a reframing of the paths threshed by architecture in the modern turn. From this document, I propose to reflect on some of Fernando Távora’s considerations regarding what he will demarcate as a cultural difference between his European/Portuguese context and the condition of North-American life at the time, particularly in what concerns the city and urban culture. The pertinence of this study will be centred on how the object of analysis permits the recognition of a contemporary urban phenomenon in Europe – the hegemony of North-American cultural models of suburbanization – spectacularly reproduced from the colonial city that the Europeans themselves emitted as a model from the XVI century onwards.