Fernanda Seixas, a Woman’s Take on Architecture as Social Intervention Fernanda Seixas, el posicionamiento de una mujer sobre la arquitectura como intervención social

This paper sheds light upon architect Fernanda Seixas (1942-2017) as a trailblazing woman in her disciplinary field in Portugal. Her archives, a set of interviews, and bibliographical research allow us to pinpoint certain characteristics that make her stand out amongst her peers, and consider her as a woman succeeding in a ‘male profession’. Trained during an era of political dissent in which she actively participated against the dictatorship of Estado Novo in the 1960s, Seixas created her own practice right after the 1974 revolution and envisaged her work as a space of socio-political activism. In the 1980s her social consciousness broadened to include environmental concerns and she became a pioneering architect on the issues of energy efficiency and bioclimatic architecture. This technical approach combined with her social ethos stand out in her planning projects and built work.

4 For reference, according to these would be: the palingenetic myth, the myth of the new nationalism, the imperial myth, the myth of rurality, the myth of honourable poverty, the myth of the corporatist order, and the myth of the Catholic essence of national identity. Rosas, "O salazarismo e o homem novo," 1034-6.
5 Rádio e Televisão de Portugal, Ler+ ler melhor -Irene Pimentel (2012), accessed November 2, 2021 https://ensina.rtp.pt/artigo/irenepimentel-faz-um-retrato-da-mulher-no-estadonovo/. myths 4 on which the regime was founded; of these two appear, to our view, to have contributed to the understanding of the role of women within the period impacting Seixas: the myth of the corporatist order, and the myth of the Catholic essence of national identity, particularly as it related to social conditions for women.
From the first myth comes the idea of a hierarchical 'national order' headed by a paternalistic state, which set to each citizen a specific place in that order and therefore an individual role and contribution to the larger collective. Irene Pimentel emphasised this in an interview: "men and women, children, old people, everyone had a specific role". 5 From the second myth comes the essence of being Portuguese as grounded essentially in the Catholic religion, "a defining attribute of nationality itself and its history" 6 and a framework for the structuring concepts of the new order -'authority' and 'nation'. Salazarism was thus synthesized in the triad "God, Fatherland and Family", a hierarchy that in a determinant way organized the role of women in Portuguese society.
The concepts of biological essentialism -"foundation of the culture and political order of the Estado Novo" 7 -represented the natural complementarity between men and women and distinguished their roles. The regime defined them clearly and showed them to be equivalent, though fundamentally different and mutually exclusive: "the exclusion in one sex of everything that belongs to the other". 8 The woman had a destiny that -different from that of the man -was the same for all women who shared the same matrix: that of being a woman-mother. This common 'nature' equally assigned them the same domain: the woman-as-home; and the same mission: woman-as-motherland. 9 In this context, the irreplaceable leading role of women manifested, therefore, in the ruling of the house -the home and the family -the private space, the "place for the transmission of values, the permanence of tradition, the cult of nationalism, reproducing model of obedience to the leader", as stated by Helena Neves. 10 Therefore, the "apparent social valuing of the female function" 11 -to use Pimentel's words -namely through motherhood and household work, had implications for the relationship between women and the labour market. As a consequence, employment was not only discouraged, but actively constrained by legislation that prohibited women's access to certain professions, or restricted them on the basis of marital status, and in general, if they were married made them subject to the husband's permission. 12 The fact is that 16.9% of women in the labour market in 1940 decreased to 13.1% in 1960 (606,000 women), "while active women increased from 2 million and 283 thousand to 2 million and 894 thousand", including those occupied with domestic tasks. 13  Left Movement 34 (MES), one of the many political parties that emerged in the dawn of democracy. Seixas (like several others) left the following year, before the 25th of November 1975 when the party radicalized around the idea of a then possible civil war. 35 After this, Seixas distanced herself from the political-partisan-associative activism, even if remaining ideologically in tune with her second husband who remained politically very active. Arguably, the religious faith of her youth and her activism as a young adult met and merged in her professional work as an architect.
She celebrated her individuality and made "the profession her political activism", 36 forging for herself a new space of action where she engaged with causes she considered socially useful.

Architecture: Profession and Political Statement
Seixas' distinctive contribution in the context of architecture is structured, within the democratic period, around two key aspects. First, she ran her own architecture studio in the city of Porto, in the 1970s and 1980s, functioning within a society still marked by many of the conservative pre-democratic referents, and in which the full assumption of the goal to establish women as 'equal' took time to consolidate.
Secondly, she developed her interest in the passive solar performance and energy efficiency of buildings, which she applied, or sought to introduce in her work from the 1980s onwards.
To these aspect, we should add a social focus -a conscience and ethos to which Seixas gave expression in different works and that emerged in support of the previous aspects of her professional practice.
Indeed, Seixas' private practice was deeply indebted to her social conscience which grew and flourished in contact with multidisciplinary work environments that brought her together with diverse people, some of whom became partners and clients. Her empathetic character, along with her technical expertise, allowed her to cultivate and expand these contacts, thus ensuring the regular flow of work in her studio. 37 Since the 1980s, she actively sought bioclimatic concerns, which took its genesis from both her notions of local identity and her sensitivity to the human and material resources of the places in which she designed. Such ideas were already present in her first works and found fruition in this era of her practice. Arguing for a need to acknowledge territorial specificities prior to its transformative appropriation (within the scope of the SAAL-Cruz de Pau project), Seixas wrote in 1976: "In view of both the rationalization of resources and ecological balance, in this type of operations the standard should be of never using land with good farming conditions for construction". 38 A selection of her built works helps to embody and illustrate Seixas' differentiated outlook, who, after the 25th of April 1974 seemed more evidently driven by concerns about ways of life and its qualification, and from the 1980s onwards, by the notions of sustainability and environmental responsiveness.

Design as a Shared Task -Dwelling, Community and Common Values
Seixas' first demonstration of her social concerns was the Local Ambulatory Support Service, which became known by its acronym, SAAL and which lasted two years from 1974-76. 39 In its genesis, this operation reflected the government's concern with the housing problem of the poorest sectors of society, distinguishing itself by establishing a "specialized technical body… to support… the initiatives by poorly housed populations in the goal of collaborating in the transformation of their own neighbourhoods". 40 The Coordinating Committee of SAAL/North appointed Seixas in the first group of "chief technicians" chosen to lead multidisciplinary teams to provide this service, selected to work on a specific area on the basis of assuming all the political scope of this intervention, it must provide an effective 'technical' response to the problems that arise… aiming at overcoming the social contradictions that are at the origin of these problems themselves. In this way, we will say that SAAL will be able to contribute to the creation of a new concept of dwelling". 48 Perhaps this quote allows us to interpret the Cruz de Pau neighbourhood and its Seixas' understanding of the project was an open challenge in which she sought, more than collaboration, the participation of other disciplines. This involvement rendered the architectural design more complex, but Seixas did not perceive a difficulty in that complexity; rather she grasped an opportunity to make the project 'grow', broadening the scope of its performance.

Local Identities -Territorial Enhancement and Infrastructures
Seixas pursued a broad set of work in differing building programs where the topic of local identity was a core issue. To focus, we restricted our assessment of this to the field of the Municipal Master Plan and the proposals for municipal facilities that she mostly carried out or supervised while working for the Municipality of Oliveira

Natural Resources, Thermal Comfort and Energy Efficiency
Since the early 1980s, energy performance and particularly passive solar use have been an integral part of Seixas' architectural principles and design work. This was a deliberate, as attested by the importance she gave to it in her Curriculum Vitae.
From the limited information listed about each work (year, name and location), she took care to distinguish individually the system used, whether energy conservation by means of insulation and ventilation (CE) or energy efficiency with passive solar strategies (EF). In this document, Seixas highlighted: "With regard to architectural design, the concern with Energy Conservation in buildings has been evident since 1983, as well as, whenever possible, the design of buildings with Passive Solar Use, Integration of Active Systems and Natural Lighting and Ventilation". 54 Seixas' interest in the energy performance of buildings was pioneering in Portugal; at the time this subject aroused little enthusiasm from her professional colleagues.
As Manuel Fernandes de Sá recalled: "Fernanda read and looked for information when none of us did and had no particular interest in the topic". 55 It is relevant to remember that in Portugal, the first legal instrument on the matter, the "Regulation of Thermal Behavior Characteristics of Buildings" (DL nº 40/90) (RCCTE), did not appear until 1990. Unlike many, Seixas did not view her interest as a technical constraint limiting the architectural design, but rather as an opportunity to deepen the ecological and environmental performance of her intervention. In this context, she worked intensively with a research group from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, led by Professors Oliveira Fernandes and Eduardo Maldonado.
Since 1984 she also participated in the Sociedade Portuguesa de Energia Solar 56 as part of the Local and National Directorates. Ultimately her concern with passive solar behaviour became consistent in her projects after 1983, and lead to the public recognition of her expertise. 57 Hora, Matosinhos -the concern with optimizing energy performance remained

Conclusion
Considered against the backdrop of the Estado Novo regime, and particularly the protest movements emerging in the 1960s against this fascist dictatorship, Fernanda Seixas absorbed key ideas and took ownership of them, forging these formative ideas and opportunities to became a forward-thinking woman within the specific disciplinary and professional context of Portuguese architecture.
In the political status quo of her youth, women were ideologically defined as "domestic", to whom fell the management of the household and who had a primordially set purpose -of women-mother -derived from their intrinsic biological nature. Seixas, born at the zenith of the dictatorship, came of age in transition between 1950s and1960s, when the signs of political decay were gradually clearer, and the country opened up to a new way of perceiving the world, particularly after 1962.
Seixas became an activist during the 1960s, initially more politically driven, and then following the 1974 revolution, more pragmatically centered on territorial and social issues. She forged her own voice to convey her value system and made "the profession her politics". She produced independent work and shaped it to her own way of seeing and relating to the world, stressing the relevance of dwelling as a critical node for discussing and answering social problems. She leveraged the municipal sphere as a framework for positive urban planning, encompassing both basic infrastructure and the preservation of local identities and specificities; and she advocated for the acknowledgement and valuing of architectural and planning interventions made in accordance to a mindful use of territorial resources and of systems of thermal comfort and optimized energy performance.
Seixas' social awareness broadened with time and gained added complexity as a result of her curiosity, her open mind towards multi-disciplinarity and her empathetic qualities which enabled her to learn from multiple and diverse people and experiences. Her works held as synthesis derived from the search for an integrated response to diverse and sometimes conflictual concerns. This distinguished her from the majority of her architectural peers. She was interested in what was socially useful and she privileged technology -how to do it well and how to do it right -over the aesthetics so cherished by the "Escola do Porto" 60 from where she graduated and whose tenets she rejected.
The uniqueness of her career is thus not confined to her being a woman in a "male's profession", and shines through in several aspects of her professional path: (1) in the enduring view of architectural designs as social intervention, be it for fundamental presence of an utilitarian sensibility in buildings, or the importance they hold as a supporting element of the communities she designs for; (2)  Seixas distinguished herself through an assertive pragmatism, straightforwardly laying out her ideas and principles. As woman and architect she forged a professional route that took an approach differing from the consensus of the time; she created her autonomy and distinctiveness in an independent practice lasting for almost four decades, and today is recognized as an authority in energetic consciousness in the national context (figure 9). 61 Bibliography