Marques da Silva - Estação S. Bento

At the end of the 19th century, the city of Porto, like Lisbon, aspired to be French. The São Bento Station, designed by architect José Marques da Silva in the best Beaux-Arts style, would give the city a station with the monumentality and dignity that Porto's merchants and large landowners had been demanding for decades.

However, the inauguration of the station's hall only took place in 1916, after a process troubled by circumstantial problems to which Marques da Silva would respond with intelligence and tenacity – an intricate narrative that historian António Cardoso offered to the public in the first edition of *Estação S. Bento*, published by the Instituto Arquitecto José Marques da Silva in 2007 and, since then, out of print.

To António Cardoso's monographic edition, we add, in this publication, a text by Domingos Tavares that offers an architect's perspective on a project that, over two decades, underwent transformations – from the proposal for a Central Station that Marques da Silva presented in Paris to obtain his Architect's diploma from the French Government, to its adaptation to the new centrality of Porto determined by the decision to install a station in the area of ​​influence of Praça de D. Pedro, on the site of the São Bento de Avé-Maria Monastery. But also, the text signed by Cláudia Emanuel expands on the information offered by the previous edition by deepening the look at the 20,000 tiles designed by Jorge Colaço, which make this construction, strongly inspired by French thought, offer a curious synthesis of the history of our country, and especially of Northern Portugal.