Fernando Lanhas

Fernando Lanhas (1923-2012), an unusual personality with a permanent restlessness, transformed the desire to understand the mysteries of art and life and his strong sense of abstraction into a condition, into an instrument to enhance knowledge and the action to be exercised on the real and the concrete. An architect by training (he attended the School of Fine Arts of Porto between 1941 and 1947, having obtained the diploma in 1962 with a project for a museum), he left an extensive body of work that reflects the multiplicity of domains and interests in which he always dwelt on, particularly recognized and awarded in the field of painting and drawing. In an incessant search for an understanding of the world and the forces that govern the Universe, from micro to macro scale, between Science and Art, in addition to architecture and the plastic arts, he covered disciplinary areas as diverse as archeology, astronomy, museum studies, ethnology and botany. In turn, poetry and the recording of dreams, also present in this constellation, represented escape routes to a dream-like dimension shaped according to his imagination. He was also an inveterate collector, spreading his attention to objects as diverse as fossils, pebbles, sand from different parts of the world, rocks, toys and labels. However, over approximately five decades (1940-1990) he never stopped exercising the activity of training. His architectural work, which began in the late 1940s with Fernando Távora, uniquely synthesizes the values ​​of his time, albeit acculturated and adjusted to the places where it is inscribed and the circumstances that dictate it. It is a modern architecture and distinctively from Porto, in search of a fair balance between current, conventional life and the possibilities of renovation dictated by the time in which it takes place. In his path, his participation in ODAM [Organization of Modern Architects] and a significant number of houses stand out, including the one he designed for himself, residential blocks and public buildings that accompany and help shape the expansion of the city of Porto, in particular during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the study of/for museums – a visible sign of the growing importance of this sphere in his personal interest, well expressed in the 70s and 80s.