LABORATORY FOR THE BASES OF CONTEMPORARY PORTUGUESE ARCHITECTURE

Introduction

The political and economic scenario of the new millennium involved a critical discourse on architecture. After the affluent 1990s, a time when the European project became more consolidated, came a time of instability that spread through different aspects of society – east-west conflicts, financial crises and technological developments led to a change of cycle and new world order. This process evidenced the vulnerability of European convergence and revealed the difficulty southern European countries experienced in keeping up with the demands of today’s economy. A rather introspective and humanistic feeling, the concern with environmental issues, identity and sovereignty principles influenced the discourse of several social movements which were organized in this period.

In the field of architecture, this disquiet triggered a regenerating sensitivity and the idea of returning to a solid basis, able to consolidate the foundations of project practice and culture. In Portugal, the fours decades of democracy were analyzed so as to uncover an idealistic basis that would allow for overcoming the crisis. In this context, the South, cultural ancestor of Europe, was considered an inspiration for an alternative to the ongoing process.

Portuguese Culture and the culture of the South – Vítor Figueiredo and Siza Vieira in Évora.

The current social and political scenario of instability opened the opportunity for understanding the specificities of a unifying thought underlying contemporary Portuguese architecture and its link to the South.

Journals such as L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Architecture Mouvement Continuite, or Lotus Internacionalii would show what was produced in Portugal at that time, as well as the concepts present in the production and the discourse of architects. L’Architecture d’Aujourd’huiiii, in particular, would publish a theme issue on Portugal in 1976 entitled “Dossier Portugal An II”, presenting a wide perspective and, as Gonçalo Byrne stated in his paper “the guidelines of a new architecture” and the mentors engaged in this new challenge.

The pragmatic character of plain architecture would contribute to explain and guide young architects who, on the one hand, faced new territories in the outskirts of the cities, and, on the other, the need to implement ideas compatible with the end of the Modernist movement. In 1962, Fernando Távora summarized this when he mentioned the idea of “circumstances” (Távora, 1982, p. 34) as the grounds for a humanist process of space organization. He defined “circumstances” as a set a factors surrounding the individual “aquele conjunto de fatores que envolvem o homem, que estão à sua volta e, porque ele é criador de muitos deles, a esses haverá que juntar os que resultam da sua própria existência, do seu próprio ser.” (Távora, 1982, p. 34). The meaning of the word chosen by Távora included the sense of open construction, built with the awareness of time and able to accommodate the complexity of actions carried out in the territory.

The relation between George Kubler’s work and the process taking place in Portugal in the transition towards democracy was defined by Duarte Cabral e Mello (1941-2013) in a paper published in the journal Arquitetura (Mello, 1979), in which the author recalled the importance of the American historian’s work on the architecture of Vítor Figueiredo (1929-2004). Cabral de Mello drew a link between plain architecture and the independence and experimentation of social housing projects developed in that time and under budget restrictions. In order to describe the work by Figueiredo, Cabral de Mello emphasized the lack of ornamentation, the freedom from academic rules and the vernacular style, typical of plain architecture, which is closely linked to present traditions “às tradições locais vivas do que aos autores de um passado remoto” (Mello, 1979, p. 25). Kubler’s work paved the way to scholarly thought on the survey on popular Portuguese architecture (Inquérito à Arquitetura Popular Portuguesa), which had involved architectures from 1955 and up to its publication in 1961, and which represented an architecture influenced by the contradictions of a Mannerism carried out far away from Europe’s main cultural centres.

In the1990s, this would be taken to the extreme by Vítor Figueiredo in the Mitra university campus (1992-1995), in Évora. The architect designed a morphological structure defining a long yard, characterized by its monotonous composing elements in the vicinity of the archetypal church of Bom Jesus de Valverde, whose design is attributed to Manuel Pires or Diogo de Torralva.

Álvaro Siza Vieira also designed social projects in the city of Évora in the 1970s, such as Bouça and São Vítor. In 1977, he designed the urbanization project of Quinta da Malagueira. In view of its dimension and complexity, Malagueira is a core work in the career of Álvaro Siza. Designed to include 1200 houses in about 27 acres, this project linked Siza and the city of Évora for about 20 years. This project, carried out in an area where Roman remains can be found, is the starting point for a conceptual exploration phase on classical structures, rather unassuming and constantly renewed through the manipulation of references in each work.

At Malagueira, Siza was able to exploit the foundations of his architecture, manipulating basic issues such as infrastructure, typology, white materiality, the yard, light and shadow in a laboratory mode. In this project, the cubist composition is highlighted by the intense light and the deep shadow around it which unify the project in the vicinity of the historical downtown of Évora, harmonizing and disciplining the city’s expansion in the last decades.

Malagueira’s plasticity established a link with the traces of the Arab world mainly present in the South. The kasbah, proposed by Team 10 as an urban alternative to the determinism of the modern city, is worked by Siza in the narrow tension created inside the neighbourhood and inside the buildings, evidencing the inspiration collected in the trip the architect made to Morocco in September 1967.iv That trip is present in Siza’s work and in Portuguese culture, as Alexandre Alves Costa (n.1939), compagnon de route in this adventure, describes:

The South as a laboratory for modern construction in Portugal

Noteworthy is to analyse the development of critical thought on modern Portuguese architecture. One of the cornerstones of controversy regarding the “desired” blend between modernity and tradition (important in the debate on national architecture in the 20thc) may be found in Raul Lino’s (1879-1974) thoughts on the campaign “Casa Portuguesa” (Figueiredo, 2007, p. 319-366) and the underlying Southern sensitivity.

The author of A nossa Casa (1918) and Casas Portuguesas (1933) launched the debate. However, the debate dates from the end of the 19thc and is made more visible in 1900, in his design of Portugal’s pavilion for the Paris World Fair. The design blends several styles and eras and clearly draws inspiration from the Arab traces present in the Alentejo region “um atrevimento (…) inspirado em estilos de várias épocas combinados numa composição verosímil e bastante harmoniosa, em que sobressaiam reminiscências amouriscadas do nosso Alentejo”. Lino states that the Alentejo region was his first love upon his return from Hanover (where he studied under Abercht Haupt (1852-1932) “primeiro namoro depois do regresso a Portugal,” (Lino in AAVV, 1969, p. 29).

Lino’s grand tour around Portugal in 1897-1898 with watercolour painter Roque Gameiro (1864-1935), marks the start for his fascination with the South and with the Southern “way of life”. His interests lay particularly in the mudejar style“o mudejarismo e o pseudo-mudejarismo do Alentejo e Algarve”vi. According to Pedro Vieira de Almeida, this was essential for Lino’s career “Peregrinação que o fizera entender os valores formais de uma arquitetura de sol, as subtilezas dos jogos de claros escuro, de transparências e reflexos de muros caiados e de maneira mais responsável, os valores de habitar que esse vocabulário definia”.

Raul Lino would go on another trip around the South, to visit Morocco, in 1902, with the help of Alexandre Rey-Colaço and of his brother Emílio-Rey who lived in Tangiers, where the family came from. This would be the final argument as the grounds for the hypothesis “4 Casas Marroquinas”, launched by Vieira de Almeida in the catalogue on Lino for the exhibition in Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, in 1970 (Pimentel et al, 1970, p. 138). The houses Casa Monsalvat (1901), Silva Gomes (1902) and Villa Tânger (1903), in Monte do Estoril and Casa Jorge O’Neill (1902), in Cascais, some of the first houses the architect designed, evidence the impact of his experiences in a territory where shapes and lives were free of influences and allowed for a return to the beginning of time.