Inheriting the role and competences of the former institute, the FIMS embodies the legacy of Architect Maria José Marques da Silva, and its social goal is to promote science, culture, education and art, especially the classification, preservation, conservation, research, study and dissemination of the entire artistic and architectural heritage of the architect José Marques da Silva, as well as the literary, artistic, architectural and urban collection of the architects Maria José Marques da Silva Martins and David Moreira da Silva. FIMS also promotes the incorporation of other information systems of heritage, historic, scientific, artistic or documentary interest, preferably those related to Porto's and Portuguese architecture and urbanism.
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From 2006 onwards, taking one of its statutory missions into account, the IMS, as it then was, started to incorporate other collections relevant to the study of architecture, namely, information systems yielded by the activity of various architects and architecture students from Porto.
To that end, the institution accepted documentation donated by António Cardoso Pinheiro de Carvalho (1932-), a historian and emeritus professor of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto, who devoted a great part of his research to studying the work of architect Marques da Silva.
After that, in 2011, FIMS also took in the collection of architect Fernando Távora (1925-2005), under a gratuitous loan agreement.
On 27 May 2013, an agreement was entered into to donate the professional archive of
architect José Carlos Loureiro (1925-).
On 19 June 2014, a donation contract relating to the archives and library of architect Alcino Soutinho (1930-2013) was also signed at a public ceremony. This collection consists of documentation produced in his Architecture Office between 1958 and 2012.
In 2015, the collection of the military architect João Marcelino Queiroz (1892-1982) was also incorporated, through the donation made by his heirs.
On 12 May 2015 is incorporated a set off digital information, belonging to Eng. Alberto Álvares Ribeiro (1842-1926), donated by their relatives.
These collections are kept in an architectural complex with unique qualities that comprises the Atelier House of architect José Marques da Silva, the mansion of the Lopes Martins family and the pavilion/archive, in Marquês de Pombal Square, Porto. All collections are open for the public to view.
The FIMS adopted an innovative approach to handle the information systems (IS), based on the principle of a broader definition of IS as the sum of all registered information, in any format, produced by a variety of actors and derived from a variety of sources. This means that books, magazines, letters, descriptive documents, reports, projects, work processes, drawings, paintings, sculptures, furniture, plaster, etc., although very different from one another, have certain common denominators: they all belonged or were produced by certain members of one family/architecture office and were used by the family/office during the course of their lives. This diversity of documents, linked by the family/business context and the respective actors, is entirely in keeping with the systemic unity that surrounds it and that gives it a full meaning.
The application of the systemic model, or SIAP (Active and Permanent Information System), has important descriptive implications that should be clarified so that the users can make the best use of the interactive search available on this website.
The IS structure, accessible via this webpage through the AtoM platform, is divided in two categories: the personal/family context and the business context. This means that the documents and objects produced and collected by a single person or family throughout several generations can be accessed independently, document by document and/or object by object, via the organic/Functional Table (QOF), according to the respective cataloguing. This table, in the case of a family, is organised by generations, and sub-organised by the family's main couple and siblings of one of the spouses, and the documents/objects are organised according to ownership. For each person, the documents and objects are organised by the main stages of life: childhood (birth to 16 years); adolescence (16 to 23 years); and adulthood (24 onwards).
The bibliographic, archival and museum information is backed up on specific databases which are, however, interconnected. For example, the QOF for the Marques da Silva/Moreira da Silva family is contained in two databases, allowing the public to search for publications and various documents and artefacts that belonged to the family throughout their lifetime.
