Peripheral and Central Stances in Portuguese Architecture Culture

• Autor(a) principal: Costa Agarez, Ricardo
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10174/23743
• topic: Modern Movement; Critical Regionalism; Postmodernism; Historiography; Bruno Zevi; Nuno Portas

In his acceptance speech for the 2011 Pritzker Prize, architect Eduardo Souto de Moura explained how, when he began practicing after the 1974 revolution, the a ordable housing shortage in Portugal demanded his (belated) modernist approach: To ‘build half-a-million homes with pediments and columns would be a waste of energies’; postmodernism, he added, made little sense where there had ‘barely been any Modern Movement at all’. A ‘clear, simple and pragmatic language’ was needed, and only ‘the forbidden Modern Movement could face the challenge’. Moura’s words perfectly encapsulate the country’s post-revolutionary architectural culture tropes, which dominated published discourse since: modernism, not postmodernism, deserved a place in 1980s Portugal because it had been resisted by a conservative dictatorship; this also explained why it was absent from international architecture surveys. The exception were the works of two other Portuguese exponents, Fernando Távora and Álvaro Siza, co-opted by survey authors since the 1980s in their drive towards global comprehensiveness: Kenneth Frampton, William J. R. Curtis and most recently Jean-Louis Cohen all have celebrated these architects’ site-sensitive, vernacular-infused modernism, occasionally straight-jacketed into critical regionalism constructs. Such recognition was promptly embraced by contemporary Portuguese architects and critics, eager to see their culture associated with a ‘good brand’ of regionalism, resistant and profound; most felt it was the ‘bad’, retrograde regionalism of the 1940s that, manipulated by the regime, countered modernism. Thus a two-pronged ‘forbidden modern movement’ / ‘redeeming critical regionalism’ tale ourished in Portugal. By borrowing the conventions and constructs of international historiography in a politically sensitive and conscience-searching moment of national life, contemporary Portuguese architectural culture e ectively narrowed its own relevance to a handful of names and works, thus attening the country’s diverse forms of modernism: from the tentative to the mature, local, cultural, technological and material speci cities determined a richly textured production that requires scholarly re-examination.