Tomás Taveira (born 1938) is a Portuguese architect. He is among Portugal's most highly-acclaimed architects born in the 20th century. He has a degree in architecture from the Technical University of Lisbon and owns a post-graduation from the MIT (U.S.A.).[1] Three stadiums specially built for the UEFA Euro 2004 were designed by the architect Tomás Taveira.
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Tomás Taveira's emblematic buildings include:
In the 1980s he was involved in a sex scandal when some personal home-made recordings were found in videotapes and sent to the Portuguese magazine Semana Ilustrada. The recordings showed him having sexual intercourse and rough anal sex with different younger women inside his office at Amoreiras, Lisbon. Since then he gained huge notoriety. The Spanish magazine Interviú also published photos of the recorded scenes which prompted Taveira's lawyer to request court action against the magazines.[3]
The infamous recordings with hardcore sexual content were made available in VHS tapes that spread to the general public and later on peer-to-peer networks. Due to this scandal and related negative publicity, Taveira faced personal and professional setbacks until the late 1990s.[4]
The Taveira sex tapes scenes, also known in Portuguese as Taveiradas, reached a kind of cult status among adult content consumers, particularly Portuguese young males, for a number of years. In a similar way, his detractors use the term Taveiradas pejoratively, to describe Taveira's architectural works which they do not appreciate or consider bizarre.
The housing complex projected by Taveira in Chelas, Marvila, Lisbon has recently been scheduled for partial demolition. The main reason behind this municipal decision is urban and social degeneration caused by uncontrollable drug use and traffic, increased crime rates and juvenile delinquency. The building complex has proved to be quite propitious to such behaviours as it includes quite a lot of underused, marginal spaces with difficult possibilities of natural surveillance.
One of the main streets, named The Corridor of Death has been the stage of many gangster homicides and other crimes. The municipality found no solution other than the demolition of some blocks, as it was impossible to regenerate such spaces created by Taveira. This area has been depicted many times in Portuguese film history, including the film Zona J and the short-film Arena by João Salaviza, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Festival.
Due to the prejudice associated with this area, the neighborhood decided to switch the name from Zona J to Bairro do Condado.
Taveira was a professor at the architecture department of the Technical University of Lisbon (UTL) until 2003 when he was expelled due to a disciplinary process.[5]