“Widening the scope of modernism: is there room for Portuguese fascist architecture?”, em Southern Modernisms. Critical Stances through Regional Appropriations, ed. de Joana Cunha Leal, Maria Helena Maia e Begoña Farre, Porto, CEAA e IHA, 2015, p. 59-71. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Southern Modernisms: Critical Stances through Regional Appropriations: Conference Proceedings, 2015
The nexus between tradition and modernity is long-rooted in the intellectual and political discourses about a Portuguese architecture identity, either as a dialogue construed as a national specificity, or as a dichotomy that stresses different actors' distinct and even opposing cultural understandings and political uses of categories of culture and time. Recently, however, the history and critique of modernism in architecture has overcome the mainstream readings of its corpus, mitigating its orthodoxy, and disclosing long-standing relationships between modern architecture proposals and vernacular settlings. Such rereading has triggered a revision of Portuguese history of architecture, in particular regarding the gate-keeping conceptions of Portugal as an isolated and peripheral country, and the political stances of particular architectural productions. This paper aims to discuss the extent of the tradition-modernity bindings in the spacialisation of a Portuguese identity in architectural discourses. In this scope, it will look into the survey on the 20th century Portuguese architecture conducted by the Portuguese architects between 2003 and 2006, as an expression of how Portuguese modern architecture is being emically construed. Taking into account its process and outcomes, and its authors' purposes and reasoning, the paper will examine its modes and hues, evaluating the dynamics beyond the production of a history of architecture and its relating to broader processes of imagining the past and culture in Portugal.
A. Cardoso; M.H. Maia, "Tradition and Modernity. The Historiography of the Survey on Regional Architecture" in Approaches to Modernity / Edited by Maria Helena Maia and Mariann Simon. Porto: CEAA, 2015
In this paper we intend to make a first approach on the historiography of the Survey on Regional Architecture in Portugal, in an attempt to understand how it relates to the historical and critical interpretation that its authors created, as well as to identify its divergences and convergences with current historiography. With the study of the survey and its subsequent publication titled Popular Architecture in Portugal (1961), we pretend intend also to understand how its existence was used in the construction of the critical discourse about the links between tradition and modernity in the context of Portuguese modern architecture evolution.
Modernity and Continuity: Alternatives to Instant Tradition in Contemporary Brazilian Architecture
At the end of the 1970s, Critical Regionalism questioned the homogenization of architecture brought by modernism. The movement claimed a necessity for the mediation between ‘universal civilization’ and ‘local culture’, establishing the possibility for a meaningful yet progressive architecture to take form. In the face of a visible standardization of architecture throughout the globe, as portrayed by the reckless replication of design solutions disregarding local environmental and social conditions, the idea of Critical Regionalism seems relevant. However, the critical part of this discourse must be reframed in order to release the ‘local’ from its aesthetic form, establishing new possibilities for architecture to address its context in innovative ways. This paper examines examples of both purely aesthetic regionalism and creative solutions for addressing local issues. The study focuses on both past and contemporary Brazilian architectural solutions. Brazil currently faces a continuous increase in its construction market, but it is in past solutions that the most creative locally inspired architecture can be found. Through the examination of such examples, the paper will explore both the problems and potentials of a critical and regionalist Brazilian architecture.
FRANÇA's "QUIET MODERNISM" and the work of the architects Carlos e Guilherme Rebelo de Andrade.
This article discusses the term ‘Quiet Modernism’, coined by José-Augusto França (arguably the most relevant Portuguese art historian of the 20th century) in relation to the work of two Portuguese architects from the first half of the 20th century, Carlos and Guilherme Rebelo de Andrade, to whom the term originally related. Although the historian used the term only once in a major study about 19th century art, here it is discussed in relation to his broader notions of ‘Modernism’, ‘Modernity’, ‘Modern’ and ‘Equivocal Modernism’, implying that the term ‘Quiet Modernism’ seems to jeopardize the perceived reading of his interpretation of traditionalism, regionalisms and nationalist references in architecture as pejorative. Also, I focus my analysis on the relationship between Nationalism and history, in the context of Portuguese history of art and architecture, and the broader frame of the antithetical discourse of Modernism master narrative. I do this in order to highlight the relevance the term ‘Quiet Modernism’ seems to have, at the dawn of the authoritarian regime of the Salazar dictatorship, as a notion that might serve to draw a distinction between a propagandist use of Modernist architecture and a broader notion of Modernism.
This article discusses some of the terms used by historians throughout the twentieth century when referring to traditional architecture propositions. Creating a relationship between the legitimation of the term Regionalism applied to architecture and the need of acknowledgement of the relation between Regionalism and Modernity in the context of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. It also raises the issue of using modernist narrative categories in the history of Portuguese architecture, highlighting the term "Quiet Modernism" by José-Augusto França as the exception.
Questions on space and intersections in the historiography of modern Brazilian architecture
ABE Journal [En ligne], 7|2015, URL: http://abe.revues.org/2610; DOI: 10.4000/abe.2610 , 2015
The present text proposes a spatial approach to a particular historiographical analysis: the deconstruction of the Brazilian modern architecture narrative as advanced by its main proponent architect Lucio Costa. The analysis is advanced from three different perspectives. The first concerns the place from within the Brazilian modern architecture narrative evolved or the position occupied by Lucio Costa during the 1930s, a period of major cultural unrest under the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937-1945). The second perspective invoked the field of cultural geography scrutinizing Costa’s understanding of the concept of history and the way he operated the notions of transferences, exchanges, and dialogues either in the contemporaneous cultural space or between the past and the historical present. Costa’s commitments to the assertion of a national identity emerge vis a vis the supranational character of American scholars George Kubler and Robert Chester Smith’s formulations on Latin American art and architecture. The third and last perspective introduces the idea of cultural dialogue, following the tradition of the spatial theoretical formulations of Georg Simmel and Martin Buber in the first quarter of the 20th century.
THE ROOTS OF BRAZILIAN MODERN ARCHITECTURE
REGIONALISM, NATIONALISM & MODERN ARCHITECTURE international conference Conference proceedings October 25-27, 2018 CEAA | Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo Escola Superior Artística do Porto Portugal, Edited by Jorge Cunha Pimentel Alexandra Trevisan Alexandra Cardoso
In 1927, architect Gregory Warchavchik built the first modernist house in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo. The synthesis of local and international, laid down in the works of Warchavchik at the turn of the 20's and 30's, developed into a national version of modernist architecture. The article analyzes the architect’s approach in combining worldwide modernist features and national elements, which appears to be in tune with the ideas of Oswald de Andrade laid out in his Cannibal Manifesto, laying a foundation for the development of brazilianness in architecture. Pp.465-473