A TAG Talk by Prof. José Cornelio da Silva.
This Talk will be published on our YouTube channel and linked here, when available.
The universe becomes intelligible to us through order, the primordial concern of planning and design. Architecture begins in the realm of ideas, where proportion may be perfect, form coherent, and every part reconciled with the whole. Yet it must inevitably descend into reality: into matter, gravity, climate, economy, regulations, circumstances, and the imperfect actions of human beings.
Our great voyage will unfold within this enduring tension between the clarity of the imagined and the resistance of the real. Drawing from the teachings of Stoicism and Epicureanism as architectural dispositions, we learn, respectively, to recognize limitations, to work with necessity, and to give dignity to restraint, while understanding that the purpose of such discipline is not renunciation, but fulfilment: the creation of places capable of offering pleasure, serenity, intimacy, and joy.
Architecture, in its pursuit of the Sublime ideas, has the power to transfigure adversity and provide consolation. It transforms constraints into order, necessity into expression, and matter into a coherent narrative. In the search for Beauty, which is neither ornament nor indulgence, Architecture should reconcile the ideal with the possible, limitation with freedom, and discipline with pleasure.
Join Prof. Jose Cornelio Da Silva in a peripatetic conversation through projects and ideas, teachings and travels, friendships, passions, and love, a journey intended not merely to recount a practice, but to remind us what first made us choose, with conviction, architecture as our craft.
José Cornelio da Silva is a Portuguese architect, professor, author, painter, and conservation specialist with more than four decades of experience. His work encompasses architecture, urban design, interiors, historic restoration, landscape, and garden design—disciplines he regards as interconnected aspects of creating meaningful and enduring places.
Educated at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, he later pursued advanced training in architectural history and conservation. He has combined architectural practice with a sustained commitment to teaching and research, founding and chairing the School of Architecture at the Portuguese Catholic University in Viseu, directing the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Studies Program, and serving as Associate Professor at Notre Dame Campus in South Bend, Indiana.
His projects include residences, embassies, wineries, cultural buildings, church design, urban plans, interiors, historic monuments, and gardens. The Oriental Garden at Quinta dos Loridos in Portugal, and the more recently the restoration of the Garden of Castello del Gallo at Mandela near Tivoli, illustrates the central place of landscape within his architectural thought, Painting has likewise remained an important means of exploring his travels and illustrating his diaries.
His books and essays address the cultural landscape and architectural history of Sintra, Manueline architecture, theory and history of conservation and restoration, traditional urbanism, durability in construction, sacred space, and the dialogue between tradition and modernity. His work has received international architectural recognition, including the Honour Award of the Philippe Rotthier European Prize for the Reconstruction of the City.
Across practice, scholarship, teaching, and the arts, his career reflects intellectual curiosity, disciplined observation, and a sustained responsibility towards people, places, and history. His work understands architecture as a learned craft: one capable of carrying cultural memory while contributing to human fulfilment.