What is an architect? The singular case of Manuel Graça Dias and his multiple selves

Abstract

This paper departs from a seminal text by Michel Foucault — “What is an Author?” (1969) — in order to question some of the idiosyncrasies of being an architect, particularly within the contemporary Portuguese realm. By transposing some of the concepts and ideas of Foucault’s essay into current architectonic debates, we aim to reflect on the “architect-function” through an analysis of Manuel Graça Dias’s work. For Foucault, the question of “What is an Author?” (extrapolated in this paper’s argument as the correlating question, What is an Architect?) is fundamentally linked both to the function of the author’s name — that performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function — and also to the question of what constitutes a “work” (oeuvre) — If an individual were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left behind in his papers, or what has been collected of his remarks, could be called a “work”? In the case of Manuel Graça Dias, an architect divided between multiple forms of discourse production (construction, drawing, writing, teaching, film, television, radio, etc) who also nourishes a peculiar appreciation for forms of “architecture without architects”, one could inquire: How can Manuel Graça Dias architectonic practice be delimited, when it is scattered through a plurality of selves? What ultimately constitutes his “work”? Finally, what defines him as an Architect?