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U.Porto Memory

University of Porto Famous Alumni

António Segadães Tavares

António Segadães Tavares 1944- Engineer and university teacher

António Segadães Madeira Tavares was born in Luau, Angola, in 1944.
As a young child, he used to build houses, stations and bridges out of wood and cardboard, an activity which was an harbinger of his future career.
At the age of 16, he went to Lisbon to study but he never forgot his country of origin, which had significantly marked his life.

His passion for space travels and for science fiction books influenced him to enrol in 1962 in Instituto Superior Técnico to study Electrical Engineering. However, he soon realized that he was tailored for another branch of Engineering.
At that time, he became involved in students’ movements, joined the democratic and European ideals of MPLA and left Lisbon to move to Coimbra. Here, he enrolled in Civil Engineering, which he completed at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, in 1968, with the best marks in that year, which earned him the first of many awards: the Engenheiro António de Almeida Foundation Award.

Before he completed his degree, he began teaching, free of charge, and as soon as he finished the course he was invited for the position of Assistant at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, to teach Materials Resistance and Applied Elasticity and Plasticity). He taught at this school until 1973.
As a teacher, he was also responsible for the Specialization Course "Matrix Analysis of Structures " of the National Laboratory of Civil Engineering (1971/1973), held the position of Professor at the University of Luanda (Chair of Reinforced Concrete and Prestressed Concrete and of Applied Elasticity, between 1974 and 1975) and is Full Guest Professor of the Department of Civil Engineering of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of Universidade Nova in Lisbon since 1999.

He began his professional activity as an engineer at the Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil, where he trained to be an expert between 1969 and 1975, at the end of which he directed the Department of Studies and Projects at Teixeira Duarte, Engenharia e Construções, SA (1976/1980) and assumed the position of Technical Director of TRIEDE – Consultadoria e Projectos de Engenharia Civil, Lda. (1980/1986). Since 1986, he has been the Director and person in charge of the company STA – Segadães Tavares & Associados, Engenheiros e Arquitectos Consultores, Lda.
António Segadães Tavares also worked in the consulting business abroad, in particular in Angola, the United States, Gibraltar, Mozambique and Venezuela.
He has worked as project designer since 1969 in the field of structures and foundations, participating in groups or solo in several projects, and is involved in project coordination and reviews.

He is a Consulting Member of the Association of Engineers as a structures expert, an institution which he represented at the Board of Public Works for the "Commission for the Registration and Classification of Public Work and Industrial Contractors of Civil Construction " (1983/1986) in which he chaired the Commission of Engineering Specialty in the South Region (1989/1992); he is also a member of "fib" (International Federation for Structural Concrete), of "GPBE" (Portuguese Group of Structural Concrete), of "IABSE" (International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering), of "ACI" (American Concrete Institute), of "APEE" (Portuguese Association of Structural Engineering), of "ISSMFE" (International Society for Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering) and of the Portuguese Society of Geotechnics.
He wrote the book "Análise Matricial de Estruturas" [Matrix Analysis of Structure], edited by LNEC (1972) and several papers presented in congresses and conferences, in both Portugal and abroad, and articles published in foreign scientific journals.

In his engineering work, Segadães Tavares seeks, above all, functionality, safety, beauty in line with architecture, characteristics that are visible in buildings such as the Centro Cultural de Belém, the concrete visor of the Portuguese Pavilion in Expo'98, Vasco da Gama Shopping Centre, Meridien Hotel, in Lisbon, and the Karl Marx Institute of Economics and Management, in Luanda, which earned him national and international fame and reputation.
Among the several awards he has received, the following are noteworthy: "Outstanding Structure Award" in 2004), awarded by the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering for the expansion project of the Madeira airport runway, in Funchal, and the LECA (1998) and SECIL (2001) Awards.

Despite his curriculum, he is modest enough to recognize that his engineering work is far from being a masterpiece like, for example, Adrian’s Pantheon, a roman temple from the 2^nd century which still has its original rooftop.
According to those who know him, in his private life he is a practical man of strong convictions, a man who loves plastic arts and who in his free time enjoys talking, listening to music, reading, dancing, cooking for his friends, sailing and travelling.
(Universidade Digital / Gestão de Informação, 2010)