Francisco F. Melo e Jorge Gigante: A tradição não tem cobertura em telha

Abstract

The office composed by Francisco Figueiredo Melo and Jorge Gigante, over which the following dissertation takes interest, produced an extensive body of work during about 40 years of activity. Unfortunately, most of the built work - mainly centralized in Porto district - remains unknown and unpublished, resulting in countless situations of degradation and unqualified interventions. Thus, this work bears a double purpose. On one hand, it serves to document and expose a compilation of unpublished projects from this office, with the optimistic hope of giving one step in the direction of preserving their legacy. On the other hand, hopefully this work will not become a simple monography - a compilation of projects organized by date - but a reading instead. For that reason, it was important to build - even if only in the background - a framework for understanding the instruction behind each project, capable of establishing relationships between certain themes and issues, that are to be understood as lessons that one can withdraw from an attentive architecture, and whose quality is proved by this very possibility.