Contributos para o (re) conhecimento da obra de Manuel Botelho - Identificação, mapeamento e registo

Abstract

Manuel Botelho, was born in 1939 in Moimenta da Beira. He completed all oh his higher education in Italy, first in Human Sciences, at the Pontificia Università Gregoriana in Rome, and later in Architecture, at the Facoltà di Architettura dell'Università degli Studi di Roma - La Sapienza (Laurea in 1978). Later, he developed his career in Portugal, where he actively practiced architecture and was a teacher at the School of Fine Arts of Porto between 1980 and 1985 and also at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto between 1985 and 2009. In parallel with his teaching practice, he has a vast, diverse and singular work. Vast in the amount of projects it develops; diversified in the program, scale and type of intervention; and singular, in the way in which his projects seek an architecture that "can only respond to the realities of the world and of life, in the synthesis of opposites, which conciliates rationality with intuition, logic with feeling, discipline with fantasy, in the atmosphere of good sense that does not deny, however, the place of poetry. (...) An architecture that responds to the renewed needs of man and feels the pulse of everyday life."4 The work of the architect Manuel Botelho also was object of distinctions and nominations for some important prizes, nationally and internationally.