Suchergebnisse

When the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation was established in Portugal in 1956, its endowments were channelled to support priority charitable, educational, scientific and arts-related initiatives, both in the country and abroad. To this end, the trust erected a political, diplomatic, technical and administrative machine that, in the second half of the twentieth century, was uncommon there; its Projects and Works Department, SPO (1957–1992), became a built environment production bureaucracy staffed by architects and civil engineers with solid design and technology cultures, working in a finely tuned, relatively well-resourced apparatus. This paper investigates the role of the Gulbenkian Foundation and the SPO in nurturing architectural and engineering research and furthering building science expertise by analysing the aims, structure, work processes, knowledge references, opportunities and reversals of this bureaucracy. I suggest that the SPO, given a mandate for professional excellence, played an essential part in the establishment and consolidation of the Foundation, in Portugal and internationally, with what aimed to be a prompt, efficient, architecturally and technically sophisticated brick-and-mortar presence that would simultaneously help assert and preserve its independence, both ideological and material. The latter was certainly paramount, and the SPO's architectural-technical expertise was put to full use within the Foundation's soft-power diplomacy strategy in Iraq, where this department's action was instrumental in maintaining access to the philanthropy's oil-concession resources.

In the first half of the 20th century, the Algarve's built-environment singularities were useful in both Estado Novo nationalistic constructs and Portuguese architectural modernism's project; but what was the role of local agency and politics in the process? This paper focuses on the fishing and canning-industry town of Olhão: a unique "Moorish-like" townscape made to represent the entire region in state propaganda, its presumed traditional features were translated into government infrastructure programmes, from low-budget housing to school building. Yet this was not merely a top-down construct: questioning superficial assertions of the reach of central dictums on regional style, I investigate the role of local actors in creating, supporting and sometimes resisting their building customs to offer a more comprehensive reading of the politics of tradition in a specific context.

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.