Peripheral and Central Stances in Portuguese Architecture Culture

Abstract

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.