GONÇALO BYRNE

I think there was another difference between the two periods that you experienced. There was, in political decisions, in the 1970s, at least in southern Europe, the influence of thinking architects, where we include yourself. And it comes to our mind the great thinkers like Aldo Rossi, Giorgio Grassi, or the Catalan School, all of them were able to produce knowledge that was porous, in relation to politics. You brought to this work, of course, this level of architectural culture and erudition. What we feel today, as architects ourselves, is that politics is completely alienated from disciplinary thinking. We do not know if architects do not also have a huge responsibility in this, because our discipline has resigned from throwing thinking to the forefront.

The perspective today, in terms of housing, is a long way from entering the world of quality. I have noticed this within the Order itself; we have insisted on the issue of architectural quality – now it will again be in the spotlight at the 16^th Congress of the Order of Architects. But I sense reactions from colleagues who say that what is needed right now is quantity. Of course, this dilemma has always existed, but one must be careful, because the problem is the “or”. Indeed, the State says this is so emerging that what is needed is to have numbers, it takes urgency. And what I say is this: yes, but without neglecting quality. And they are not incompatible. The problem is that, nowadays, the very machine of the State is completely unequipped with staff, this world that existed. I had a conversation two and a half years ago, at the very beginning of  my term as president of the Order, with the president   of the Institute of Housing and Rehabilitation (IHRU), in which I asked “How is IHRU, which is rightly in charge of managing the housing bazooka issue, going to react to this, with the deadlines, urgencies, that it has?”. And there has been an incredible effort, because it has not given up the design contest, which is already a minimal stronghold of the discussion on quality… But I insisted: “How is it, with all that needs to be done about new typologies, the new ways of inhabiting? We had a pandemic, which revealed so much, and now, with the whole issue of ecology, of sustainability, we need to rethink all of this, where is the staff to elaborate on that?”. And the lawyer said “architect, there are none of those left here”. I gave the example of the staff that there was in the Technical Office of Housing; there were sociologists, architects, engineers, there was a continuous reassessment – of what was done in North Olivais, before moving to South Olivais and Chelas – there was a continuous elaboration. And one of the issues is to think that housing, if It is thought of as an isolated context, makes no sense at all. Housing only makes sense because it is one of the essential matters of the city. Perhaps the most important of all. And a lot was learned at that time, from the point of view of proposition, but also of critical review.

Bernard Huet, who was the director of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui for a long time, came to Portugal to do the famous number on the 25^th of April. And Bernard Huet, whom I met later (he was a professor in Lausanne, and we collaborated with one another) wrote at the time a series of articles very critical of the systematic view of housing, saying that there was a kind of strand, I would say postmodern, of the machine city, of  the machine to the habiter. Repetition yes, but we have to see that this is also a consequence of a need for an absolutely disproportionate response, because two world wars, but above all the second one, forced a response, the Marshall Plan, which was so absorbed by the quantitative, that it implied heavy measures of doing, a repetitive attitude.

I went through a little bit of this critical movement, which seemed to me also important, because I think that, in the attack that is made on modern architecture, architects and architecture are unjustly victimized, to the extent that it is said that modern architecture killed the historic city, that the post-war reconstruction in Italy was disastrous for the heritage, the “Mussolinian gutting”, and so on. That is not true. We know that even in the Mussolinian period, there were things very well done. But the truth is that the great victim of the modern city, and its reconstruction, is not the architects, it is war. I have been talking about it now, because we see it live on television day and night – war is clearly the suspension of architecture, and the antithesis of architecture, and it has brutal consequences. And we are going back to that time again.

But what is happening in Portugal at the moment, and architects have to be on the proactive side, good or bad, is that we have to build, we have to create a way of not throwing away the money that exists, because there are twenty-six thousand houses. Now, with the reinforcement, with the possibility of rehabilitation, they talk of thirty-five thousand houses. We are talking about a sector that is growing desperately and the solution for that is not house selling, but renting. The policy of the late 1980s had several harmful consequences. it eliminated renting because everybody became owners. That is not bad in itself; it was a problem of the financial conjuncture, but it generated two very bad city types – one was the peripheralization of the uncontrolled city, at low costs, but still with some attractive power, where one could buy cheaply, without thinking about what would be paying afterwards on trips and in the peripheralization of the city. The other was that of a desertification of the historic center. And we are living that now.

Interestingly, there was a turning point of this perspective of the city, that has gone unnoticed, but which was very important, which was Expo ’98 Exhibition. It was a turning point because, from an ephemeral event, which is an Exhibit (in Seville it went wrong, but in Barcelona, with the Olympics, it went very well, in the sense of relaunching the whole movement of urban rehabilitation – and of some expansion as well, as there was already a lot of talk about rehabilitation). It was a cluster where the city if thought of again, with housing as a byproduct, that is, the side product, with a very curious financial engineering; and it had everything, starting from a brownfield, which was highly polluted, which was rehabilitated to make  a  piece of city,  which today is probably the most alive piece of the city of Lisbon, in terms of living. It was also continued with the Polis programs, for example, which put the reflection of the city back into the public space, which was very important. There are programs, from time to time, that governments implement, such as Rehabita, but they have minimal consequences, from the point of view of housing. And today we have only 2% of the public housing stock, one of the lowest in all of Europe, including ultra-liberal Europe such as the Netherlands, which stands at 12%.

In the past, you made a series of trips to the various English new towns and to the German siedlungs. Why is it that in Portugal this type of programme did not happen at the same time as the rest of Europe?

I was very lucky to be very close to Nuno Portas and Nuno Teotónio Pereira. Nuno Portas’ father had been my father’s class mate; they were both mining engineers. But, above all, I know the architects Nuno Portas and Nuno Teotónio, and this sensitivity that there was in them, especially in the theme of housing. There was a rethinking about modern architecture, which had to do with the last CIAM – and this comes a little bit through Fernando Távora and all the architects of the North who were linked to that generation – Viana Lima, Octávio Felgueiras, Carlos Loureiro. Then, in the South, Nuno Teotónio, Nuno Portas, João Braula Reis, and a number of other architects, introduced European authors and experiences. Távora went a lot for the revision of the CIAM and, therefore, was a little closer to the Netherlands, also Finland, and also Aldo Rossi.

Portas and LNEC introduced, fundamentally, the Italians and the English authors – amongst the Italians, not yet Rossi, but Ludovico Quaroni and INA-casa, the great Italian housing institute post-Mussolini, which did all the development of housing and which had a very important architectural and theoretical production. Also, on the English side, they introduced the whole culture of the successive new towns.

I remember visiting, as an architecture student, the London housing technical office, the Great London Council (GLC), which was studying Greater London. I went to the office, introduced myself, said that I was very curious about the work that the GLC was doing, that I had a plan of visits and that I would like to know more information about the first generation of new towns. I was greeted at the reception and, at one point, someone came down (I later came to know that the person was one of the directors of the office), who spent an entire morning with me, explaining what was being done, patient like a saint. He filled me with literature, gave me a series of clues to go visit, at the time Stevenage, Harlow, the first, we were still entering the second wave of the new towns – then came the third, which was a little closer to the garden city again. And I visited a number of others, lesser-known ones. Later on, I came back, this time as an architect.

Some of those sets are classified as World Heritage Sites. And we talk about things that, in hindsight, people recognized as collective memory. If this happened, it means that the effort of all those architects, politicians and thinkers was worth it. Making the bridge to the moment that we are going through now, the ambition should not have been less, that is, those architects knew that they were in dialogue with the times, even making the most common of programs – small topologies (some houses were thirty-nine square meters) – painful construction processes, because they were often ahead of technology. Today, in view of the urgency of which we have already spoken, it seems inevitable that ambition will be a dialogue with time to do something that is able to cope with it – and there is a paralysis.

This dimension is fundamental. Today, the big problem is that the time of politics is the time of the immediate – and I think that this is going to be very expensive, it will have a very, very high price in social terms, in terms of the city, of citizenship, of housing, of living. Because citizenship, which is the central concept on the table, is fundamental. And it is very important in the question of rights and duties, and of participation in a model that is very much in question right now. Citizenship means living in a shared space. And that is where architecture comes in. And it does not come in alone, there are more people involved, landscapers, engineers. Today, it is very important to know that architecture not only has to rethink itself a little bit, but also has to rethink that it is not alone in making cities. There are also politicians, neighbours and residents’ committees, there is a social and political movement that is essential – but which has completely broken apart.

There are already statistics on the evolution of the carbon footprint on the planet since the war began, and it is increasing again; it was reducing, but that has already reversed. And this results from war, I don’t know why that is not said. It may be said in Davos, but it does not reach the outside world and, therefore, we are living in a period in which the alternative – probably “screwed up”, but it is the great challenge, what I call an eventual new Renaissance – the paradigm shift, only goes there with a radical attitude.

To end on a bright note, imagine that you were now finishing your degree. What would you like to do? What was the work front that you would embrace?

That is a good question, to which I do not have an immediate answer, but I must say that I have been thinking and talking about it, even at the ceremonies to welcome the new members of the Order, because I usually say – and I used to say it during my Master’s thesis in Coimbra – “You people are starting over. You are entering the world and suddenly things are no longer children’s play. Now it’s serious”. Even academia sometimes generates some illusions that I think are dull, and serious, do not  make it easy to youth, like this endogamy or endogeny – which is  not a thing only of architecture; it is also due to the civilization of  nihilism, of the iconic building of architecture, of the architecture of opulence, which has been built, even a little bit, in my opinion, to the exaggeration of the ‘star architect’, that is very much linked to this architecture that today is completely questioned, because it is, in fact, also a market phenomenon.