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Activity Funded

The Architecture of Need: Community Facilities in Portugal 1945-1985

Arquitetura de Necessidade: Equipamento Comunitário em Portugal 1945-1985

Reference
PTDC/ART-DAQ/6510/2020
Project Start Date
2021-03-29
Project End Date
2025-03-28
Principal Investigator
Coinvestigator
Scientific Area
Humanities
Funding Program
Concurso para Financiamento de Projetos de Investigação Científica e Desenvolvimento Tecnológico em Todos os Domínios Científicos - 2020

Abstract

The Architecture of Need: Community Facilities in Portugal 1945-1985 looks at the commission, design and production processes of essential local community civic and farming facilities in Portugal between the end of WWII and accession to the European Community. These buildings, mostly architect-designed, are part of our daily lives and testify to architecture’s attempts at social relevance, as material bonds between creators and users of the built environment; but they have been largely ignored by the dominant culture of architecture, with its metropolitan-, art-historical-slanted approach. Now that dwindling resources must be used rationally and communities large and small need to build up their resilience in a sustainable way, a novel, comprehensive understanding of these facilities, the agents, concepts, discourses and strategies behind them and their architectural definition is paramount. This is an academic project designed to retrieve the long-lost DNA of everyday public-use and farming facilities in Portugal in order both to advance the culture of architecture and to empower local communities to knowingly reuse, transform, repurpose, maintain or eliminate critical pieces of their architecture of proximity. Building on career-long efforts by the team, this project moves away from the architecture of auteurs and artistic canons to discuss agents, pragmatic responses and service, in contexts where basic needs are met by works seen as mundane, the product of purportedly unremarkable processes. It investigates how unsung architecture, relevant for laypeople and architects in the past, might be so again in the future, by looking at where it was most directly called to address need: in essential civic and farming facilities erected in non-metropolitan areas of Portugal, specifically in the regions of Alentejo and Algarve. These include buildings for health care (medical centres, nursing homes); general public services (parish and town halls, market halls, public spaces); social support (adult and child care, community centres, transitional and lowest-income housing); public safety (fire and police stations); education, culture and leisure (museums, libraries, sports halls); and farming (granaries, co-ops, wineries, mills, slaughterhouses). Most were local initiatives by public and private bodies, with state support (technical and financial) via Public Works departments; many drew on philanthropic aid, notably from the Gulbenkian Foundation’s statutory endowments. The enquiry focuses on a four-decade period from around 1945, when the Estado Novo dictatorship regime strengthened earlier policies to capitalise on local initiative that transformed the infrastructure of mid- and small-size communities; through socio-political changes after the 1974 revolution; to the late 1980s, when the country’s efforts to join the European Community (1986) and devolve powers to municipalities changed the equation behind metropolitan, regional and local initiatives. Outputs serve a specific outreach strategy (for local communities and those involved in decision-making processes on the production, management and use of buildings) and scientific advancement, following 3 main lines of investigation: 1. Negotiating Need – Who were the subjects of need here? Who spoke for them and how, in dictatorship and democracy? Who decided on priority, on what grounds and conditions? How did programmes and responses follow local specificities? 2. Negotiating Form – Under quantity and economy constraints, how did architectural design survive, including its capacity to embody national, regional and local identities? Did pragmatism trump creativity? How do these buildings add to / alter recognised architectural typologies? 3. Learning to Reuse – What was the essential toolkit employed in this architecture of proximity? Which mechanisms, of design, technology and materiality, proved lasting? What can we learn from the use history of these buildings?

Institutions

Main Institutions

  • Universidade de Évora (Uévora)
  • Universidade de Évora Centro Interdisciplinar de História Culturas e Sociedades (CIDEHUS)

Other Institutions

  • Universidade de Lisboa Faculdade de Arquitectura (FA)
  • Universidade de Lisboa Centro de Investigação em Arquitetura Urbanismo e Design (ULisboa CIAUD)
  • Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (FCG)
  • ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL)
  • Universidade de Coimbra (UC)
  • Universidade de Évora (Uévora)
  • Republica Portuguesa Direção-Geral do Património Cultural (DGPC)
  • Universidade de Coimbra Centro de Estudos Interdisciplinares do Século XX (CEIS20)
  • Universidade de Lisboa (Ulisboa)

Funding 249.964,24 €

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Portugal

249.964,24 €