Tradition and Modernity Intertwining in the Re-presentation of Portuguese Modern Architecture: the case of the Survey on 20th Century Architecture (original) (raw)
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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
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MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND LOCAL TRADITION IN 1950`S PORTUGUESE NATIONAL INNS (POUSADAS DE PORTUGAL
Oliveira, Tiago (2018) “Modern Architecture and Local Tradition in 1950`S Portuguese National Inns (Pousadas de Portugal)” em Pimentel, J, Trevisan, A. Cardoso, A eds, (2018) Regionalism, Modernism & Modern Architecture, Porto: Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo /ESAP-CESAP, pp. 270-284, 2018
The first plan of Pousadas de Portugal was promoted in the context of the celebrations of 1940`s centenary of national independence and was integrated in the "policy of the spirit" led by António Ferro, who considered the interior of the country as the natural environment of the highest national qualities. The projects were mostly designed by Miguel Jacobetty Rosa and Rogério de Azevedo, architects born at the turn of the 19th century, who, despite evidence of syntactic experiences of modernist inspiration, explore figures linked to the model of the Portuguese house developed by Raul Lino In 1954, the second plan maintains the legal framework created for the former, where it is stated that the inns to be constructed were to be integrated as far as possible into the picturesque of the regions. However, the architects now assigned to to carry out the projects were born in the late 10s and early 20s, and were part of the so-called "modern generation" that attended the 1948 congress as students or newly graduated. In fact within this generation of architects we can identify different concerns about architecture, some of them engaged in developing the modern agenda that they felt was not yet sufficiently accomplished in Portugal, and others more concerned with the concrete conditions of each specific situation and their poetic appreciation. Nevertheless, all of them rejected the model of the Portuguese house that was still favoured by Portuguese authorities. This paper proposes to discuss these different concerns, and thus to ponder on the local reception of the Modern Movement, by comparing two projects for the second
Portuguese Plain Architecture: When history creates a myth
This paper will focus on the slight metamorphoses of architectural discourse accompanying Portuguese political and social context in the last four decades, and how the concept of Plain Architecture, as defined by the American art historian George Kubler plays a role in this progression. Kubler traveled and lived in Portugal between, during the country First Republic dictatorship, during the mid 1950s and the late 1960s, doing research for what came to be the book Portuguese Plain Architecture: between spices and diamonds 1521-1706 (1972). The premise of the book is the analysis of the architectural production during a moment of political and economical crisis. The timing of Kubler’s book publication in the early 1970s — on the brink of the 1974 revolution — accompanied a radicalization of the Portuguese architectural discourse. Kubler’s ideas were recovered in the 1990s in Portugal, not long after the tardy publication of the Portuguese translation of Kubler’s book in 1989, and became ubiquitous. More recently, in the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2008, reemerged the attractiveness towards the small, the peripheral, and the radical. Eduardo Souto de Moura described his own work within the Portuguese Plain tradition. Portuguese Plain became a myth of origin.