Centre de Simulació i Innovació en Salut (CSIS)

Under Jorge de Oliveira, an envoy from Lisbon

I have revised, above, the relationship between architects Jorge de Oliveira and Manuel Gomes da Costa, questioning existing preconceptions. However, Oliveira’s preponderance in the architecture of Faro – essential in such constructs – should not be downplayed, even as our understanding of his action towards post-war modernism accommodates new data and opens up to a more complex perspective. He held, after all, a strong official position in Algarve, as well as determinate views on how architecture should serve diverse purposes in diverse ways, which he expressed not only in designs but also in the extensive written statements that complemented them.

In this text, I intend to avoid the dichotomies that generally classify Oliveira’s architecture as

“retrograde” and dispense with the modernist moral lens through which works such as his are often filtered in architectural history. I suggest his work could be considered as conservative in the 1940s, and richly eclectic in the 1950s. Oliveira’s words and designs play an important part in an investigation of the regional and local faces of architecture in Algarve, since he devoted his time and influence to equip the region with a specific built identity.

Architecture was a late interest in Oliveira’s student life, and his second degree (after Pedagogical Sciences). Having transferred his enrolment from the fine arts school of Lisbon to Porto due to disagreements with his design tutor, architect Cristino da Silva,⁷¹ he obtained his

71 Alberto Souza Oliveira (Oliveira’s son), in discussion with the author, 3 September 2010.

diploma only at the age of 38, in 1945, possibly with the project of the new market hall in Faro as his thesis.⁷²

From 1936 to 1943, not yet a certified architect, Oliveira worked as head of architect Porfírio Pardal Monteiro’s office in Lisbon. This experience was vital for his training in the field of public architecture. According to the architect’s 1985 curriculum vitae, he co-authored a number of Monteiro’s public commissions in the capital, such as the cruise ship terminal in Alcântara (1938-1943), the Lisbon University campus (1935-1938) and the partial refurbishment of the Houses of Parliament (1940).⁷³ Monteiro’s grandiose compositions, strongly influenced by Perret, combined the innovative use of vast concrete structures and classical references in creating a monumental Moderne, much appreciated by the political establishment in the early decades of Estado Novo. The search for a particular dignity or nobility in public architecture, the moderate adoption of the modernist formal palette (toned-down by a characteristic tectonic stance) and the attention to detail are essential features in Monteiro’s late 1930s architecture that I find influenced Oliveira’s 1940s work.

Spanish public architecture may have been another strong influence. In the architect’s personal library, I found extensive collections of two important official Spanish magazines of the period, Revista Nacional de Arquitectura and Reconstrucción, which suggest Oliveira’s close attention to the development of architecture in Spain under Franco’s regime. The works published in Revista Nacional (1941-1958) were very similar to those that Oliveira was later asked to produce: schools, nurseries and kindergarten, social service and healthcare facilities, stations, market halls, administrative buildings, religious structures, housing and urban renewal operations. In fact, this magazine is testimony to the similarities between public works policies in the Portuguese Estado Novo and the Spanish Autarquía period (1939-1959). Among those, the housing programmes for workers, farmers and fishermen stand out (Viviendas Protegidas and Poblados de Pescadores⁷⁴), for which Spanish architects sought regional architectural variations in much the same way as Portuguese architects did.

Oliveira would have been primarily influenced by the mainstream formal discourse of Spanish architecture, conveyed by the Revista Nacional: heavy compositions based on symbols of the Spanish golden age, often disproportionate to the size and purpose of the building, and equally dense combinations of these nationalist references with regional specificities. The resulting eclectic elevations attempt to convey a representational role while evoking regional identities by providing controlled, modernised, at times fantasised versions of them. Although this exuberant use of past and regional elements was a widespread trend in Portugal at the time, the level of intensity to which Oliveira took it – e.g. in the Montepio building (figs. 273-274) – can be more easily found in Spain.

72 “Projecto de um Mercado Municipal. Concurso para Obtenção do Diploma [de Arquitecto],”

1947 (Lisbon-AJO). The date of 1945 is from the architects’ association registry.

73 Dates according to www.parlamento.pt, www.monumentos.pt, accessed 2011.02.01, and João Vieira Caldas, Porfírio Pardal Monteiro (Lisboa: AAP-SRS, 1997).

74 E.g. the fishermen’s housing project in Revista Nacional de Arquitectura IV, no. 42 (1945).

Designs like that of a kindergarten in the Canary Islands, built in 1941⁷⁵ (fig. 309), and the unbuilt proposal for a market hall in Madrid, of 1947⁷⁶ (fig. 310), offer interesting parallels with the Portuguese architect’s work. Ironically, it was the exaggerated size and decorative programme of some of Oliveira’s proposals – those closer to a Spanish scale – that stopped them from being fully realised. The architect also referred to the Revista for advice on technical and functional matters:

explaining his design for a 120-bed sanatorium in Alportel for the fishermen’s guilds, in 1947, Oliveira said to have studied the “types defined and approved by Spain’s Plan of Sanatoria Building,”⁷⁷ and their special requirements – the same types that the magazine published in 1943⁷⁸ and 1944.⁷⁹

Reconstrucción (1940-1957), in turn, was dedicated to the propaganda of Franco’s post-Civil War reconstruction programme. The new villages presented were generally provided with a ruralised, subdued architecture, whose features varied according to the region; often though, the projects brought in the forms of noble, historical buildings into the composition. In the pages of Reconstrucción, the contemporary Spanish taste for replicating erudite elements was dominant, ranging from the design of village squares (as in Brunete, 1940⁸⁰) to that of new-built structures in large cities (e.g. the police barracks in Oviedo, 1942,⁸¹ fig. 311). Again, Oliveira’s characteristic lexicon of the 1940s could be seen as a Portuguese counterpart to Spanish reconstruction architecture, albeit without its scale and urgency. These magazines were essential vehicles in the parallel development of Portuguese and Spanish architectural cultures; indeed, Oliveira’s case counters accepted views of such cultures as independent and unrelated.⁸²

The appointment of Jorge Oliveira as official technical advisor for Junta de Província do Algarve (JPA) and for the municipalities of Faro, Olhão, Portimão, and Vila Real de Santo António, formalised in April 1943, followed a personal invitation by the public works minister Duarte Pacheco,⁸³ who sought to reinforce the state’s technical assistance to regional and municipal authorities in his homeland.

Oliveira’s contract specified that he would be the sole responsible for all projects requested by the municipalities or the Junta, and head the latter’s new architecture and urbanism department (Serviços de Arquitectura e Urbanismo, SAU). He would also assist the provincial and municipal authorities in assessing private planning applications, as both a permanent technical advisor based

75 Ibid. I, no. 2 (1941).

76 Ibid. VII, no. 72 (1947).

77 Sanatório da JCCP, project statement [1947.06.26] (Lisbon-AJO).

78 "Concurso de anteproyectos de sanatorios antituberculosos," Revista Nacional de Arquitectura II, no.

15 (1943).

79 "El sanatorio antituberculoso Generalísimo Franco en Bilbao," Ibid. III, no. 33 (1944).

80 Reconstrucción I, no. 2 (1940).

81 Ibid. III, no. 20 (1942).

82 Cf. Pereira and Fernandes, col. (1987), 352.

83 Cf. Souza Oliveira (2010).

in SAU in Faro and visiting consultant to the mayors’ offices in the above-mentioned towns. He was not allowed to accept any other private or public commissions unless those specifically authorised by the Junta de Província.⁸⁴

The terms of this agreement should be seen in the context of provincial Portugal in the early 1940s. A general policy of strengthening the control of central government agencies over every aspect of national life matched the tangible lack of technical structures and staff in the more peripheral regions: Faro municipality only appointed its first full-time technical advisor in 1928, choosing an engineer for the role.⁸⁵ Jorge Oliveira was the first architect to serve as permanent advisor not only in Faro but also in Olhão and possibly in Portimão and Vila Real: the need for an architect in their staff is likely to have driven these underfunded municipalities to congregate around the Junta and employ him. This was simultaneously a problem and an opportunity for the establishment in Lisbon: since there were no architects living in Algarve (or very few)⁸⁶ and the technical level of the production and assessment of architecture, private and public, was perceptibly poor, the road was open for the metropolitan authorities to designate whoever they believed would best serve their interests.

The position was formally one of great power. It combined the exclusive responsibility to design public architecture and urban space for every town and village in Algarve, with the possibility of controlling the face of private architecture in three of the most important and fastest-growing centres in the province (Faro, Olhão and Portimão) – and did not exclude the occasional opportunity to practice as a freelance professional. Yet the creation of such a position also added some complexity to the network of power relationships in the cadre of public and private building in Algarve. The control of each of those two spheres of building activity, nationwide, belonged to distinct entities whose actions seldom intersected up until the mid-1940s, when important changes occurred.

The responsibility for commissioning, and therefore controlling, public buildings was unevenly shared by the ministry of public works (the main role) and the municipalities. National and local agencies begun to interact more frequently after the creation of the unemployment fund and its partial allocation for public works and infrastructure (see Chapter 3). The growing importance of this policy was translated in the creation of the central public works office DGSU, in

84 Contract between Jorge de Oliveira and Junta de Província do Algarve, Câmara Municipal de Faro, Câmara Municipal de Olhão, Câmara Municipal de Portimão and Câmara Municipal de Vila Real de Santo António, 1943.04.21 (Faro-ADF/AHMF).

85 In July 1928, after Proença’s criticism of Faro in Guia de Portugal, the city council approved the appointment of a civil engineer to head its technical services, justified as essential in order to provide those with a “decent and convenient” direction and to avoid the repetition of “past errors” in the management of the city. I suggest there is a direct link between the appointment and the scathing criticism received. Faro council meeting 1928.07.12 (Faro-CMF/AHMF-17).

86 I am not in a position to guarantee that there were no architects based in Algarve in 1943: the records of the Portuguese architects association are not entirely reliable for this purpose, since there were always non-registered architects. The few architects who worked in Faro, for instance, before that date – such as Vasconcelos – did so occasionally, which suggests they were not based there.

1945, and its regional branches, among which was the Algarve-based Direcção de Urbanização de Faro (DUF).⁸⁷ This service, strongly dependent on the Lisbon head office, effectively supervised not only what the municipalities built, through the control mechanism of funding applications, but also what the Junta de Província itself promoted, since this regional body was equally dependent on state funding. By creating the SAU office under architect Oliveira’s supervision, the state was providing the municipalities and JPA with much needed technical advice, and simultaneously placing their building initiatives under the control of someone deemed trustworthy. But at a higher level, the ministry was also placing SAU, Oliveira and their regional initiatives under the control of DGSU in Lisbon and DUF in Faro, the paymasters. In this respect, the power in Oliveira’s position, while considerable at a local level, was diminished towards regional and national levels.

The control of private building had previously been the exclusive responsibility of municipalities, apart from the occasional assessment by the central office for public facilities and monuments (DGEMN), whenever a private development affected listed buildings. From the mid-1940s onwards, with the approval of the first master plans for medium and small centres across the country, that competence changed significantly: it came to include the ministerial office DGSU and its regional services, which had to be consulted for every planning application in areas covered by a master plan. In the case of Oliveira’s role in Algarve, what this meant was that although he was given a dominant position in 1943 as technical advisor to the municipalities, in charge of assessing private planning applications, he was almost at once forced to share this power with others above him in bureaucratic hierarchy, from the moment plans for Olhão and Faro were produced.

These points support my view of Oliveira’s action in SAU: it was an exercise in negotiated power, not a plenipotentiary role, and his was an action changing in time, not a monolithic body of work. This understanding counters the commonly held notion that Oliveira exerted his “design initiative (…) in every municipality in Algarve, with no need for further permissions.”⁸⁸ Once again, the image of Oliveira as a dominant figure who shaped, unchallenged, the face of Algarve and represented the sombre side of the “Battle of Modern Architecture,” stems from a superficial, black-and-white view.

87 Between 1946 and 1948, the Algarve branch was not an autonomous service but merely a section (Segunda Secção, headed by civil engineer Vicente Almeida Brandão) of DGSU’s Direcção dos Serviços de Urbanização do Sul, based in Évora and in charge of the entire south Portugal (Alentejo and Algarve). After DGSU was restructured, in December 1948, one regional branch of the central authority was created in each circumscription (distrito) of the country. The Faro branch (DUF) was headed by civil engineer Alberto Pessanha Viegas. Cf. “Correspondência Recebida Entidades. DGSU,” 1945-1954 (Faro-ADF/AHMF-C/A.2-63).

88 Fernandes (2006), 143.

Early works: conservative regionalism and the “appropriate expression”

Having moved to Faro early in 1943, Jorge de Oliveira set up an architecture office for SAU based on the template of Pardal Monteiro’s atelier in Lisbon.⁸⁹ In 1945, Oliveira’s staff included chief draftsman-designer António Rolão Júnior and draftsmen Joaquim Madeira, Manuel Palmeirinha and Francisco Barradas,⁹⁰ recruited from amongst his students at the first professional course on building techniques of Faro’s industrial and commercial school (Tomás Cabreira).⁹¹ The small group had a part in disseminating Oliveira’s architecture beyond the limits of the public office; Rolão Júnior, for instance, appears to have been an undisclosed partner in the architect’s private practice.

During the years of his contract with the Algarve agencies (between 1943 and 1957), Oliveira signed at least 139 projects, for both public authorities (89 commissions) and private clients (50 commissions). The list, in which I was able to confirm and date 70 projects,⁹² conveys the diversity of Oliveira’s task, ranging from public restrooms to church restoration, from multifamily housing to children’s summer camps, and from state and municipality offices to shelters for beggars and the elderly. His first study for Faro municipality was a building code proposal (1943) which set out general requirements for new developments concerning the boundaries between public and private spaces, salubriousness and townscape aesthetics.⁹³ Its recommendations were partly adopted in Faro’s 1945 general urban plan but it was never legally imposed, being overrun in 1951 by the national building code.

The bulk of Oliveira’s work in Algarve, both public and private, was concentrated in seven years between 1944 and 1950. The decline of his output from 1951 on coincided with the shift in Oliveira’s architecture towards post-war modernism: from the FIAAL building on, as his designs were updated and lost to some extent their strong conservative key, so the number and importance of his commissions seem to have dropped, and he concentrated more on his private clientele. This change may be connected to the shrinking power of Junta de Província in providing technical assistance to local authorities engaged in building new public-use facilities, as the DGSU office and its regional representative DUF increasingly assumed that role. Also, changes in political personnel influenced Oliveira’s commissions. The replacement of the central government’s top political delegate in the circumscription (distrito) of Faro, the governador civil, in June 1951,⁹⁴ and the corresponding shift in regional welfare policy, meant that a number of projects commissioned in

89 Cf. Souza Oliveira (2010).

90 Creche de Nossa Senhora de Fátima, file cover [1945.08.01] (Lisbon-AJO).

91 Cf. Souza Oliveira (2010).

92 I reached a provisional version of Jorge Oliveira’s complete list of works in the distritos of Faro and Beja between 1939 and 1963 by collating data from my archival research and the architect’s own curriculum vitae (1985), in which his works are undated.

93 “Projecto do Regulamento Geral da Construção Urbana para a C.M.F.,” 1943 (Lisbon-AJO).

94 Luís Vaz de Sousa, governador civil of Faro since 7 September 1948, was replaced by Agostinho Joaquim Pires in 20 June 1951, whose mandate lasted until 28 March 1953. Cf. www.gov-civil-faro.pt/governo_civil/historia, accessed 2011.02.18.

1950 and 1951 to Oliveira (the shelters to be built in Tavira, Portimão, Albufeira and Monchique, and a nursery school in Olhão) were suspended and replaced by entirely different programmes, trusted to a new generation of post-war Algarvian architects.

Oliveira’s reputation in history as a symbol of conservative architecture in Algarve rests essentially on the work he produced during his first seven years in Faro. To better understand the place and role of this architecture in a discussion about regionalisms in Algarve in the twentieth century, I have looked not only at designs and buildings but also at the architect’s written discourse:

his memórias descritivas (project statements), which have not been used before. Files from the architect’s personal archive, from the regional DUF archive, and from Faro and Olhão municipal archives, offer a comprehensive reading of Oliveira’s comments on his own architecture. This was at times puzzling and contradictory, evidence of a loquaciousness that did not necessarily find correspondence in design. Today, it provides a valuable peephole into the rationale behind the architecture that determined so much of the public and private building activity in Algarve in the 1940s.

Oliveira repeatedly said that he wanted his architecture to be “modern,” while being clearly

“Portuguese.” It should be modest, economical, sober, almost frugal, and avoid the expensive and unnecessary decorations that, he felt, predominated in his time – but not destitute of the local colour and grace, by which he sought to integrate his new works with the extant “local environment.” If this was one outstanding concern, the other was a strict obeisance to what he called “the most serious principles of Architecture” and, above all, to one rule: the face of the building should at all times have “an expression appropriate to its function.”⁹⁵

The “appropriate expression” of elevations was of utmost importance for many designers of 1940s conservative architecture, and was a key part of a latent criticism of international modernist works. Its lineage can be found in the French classical tradition and the eighteenth-century use of the notion of the “character” of architecture: according to it, all buildings should have a character or expression suited to their purpose,⁹⁶ particular and unmistakable, which set their designers apart from mere builders. The principle was laid out by Boffrand and Blondel, and had a parallel with the German Romantic generic theory of character that, highly influential in nineteenth-century architectural discourse, also contributed to the understanding of architectural expression within 1940s regionalism. In it, character was related to the national identity in art, and works of a given national or regional group were the “outward expression of their makers’ spirit”; in this sense, national (or regional) distinctions in architecture were “the outcome of the expression of the

The “appropriate expression” of elevations was of utmost importance for many designers of 1940s conservative architecture, and was a key part of a latent criticism of international modernist works. Its lineage can be found in the French classical tradition and the eighteenth-century use of the notion of the “character” of architecture: according to it, all buildings should have a character or expression suited to their purpose,⁹⁶ particular and unmistakable, which set their designers apart from mere builders. The principle was laid out by Boffrand and Blondel, and had a parallel with the German Romantic generic theory of character that, highly influential in nineteenth-century architectural discourse, also contributed to the understanding of architectural expression within 1940s regionalism. In it, character was related to the national identity in art, and works of a given national or regional group were the “outward expression of their makers’ spirit”; in this sense, national (or regional) distinctions in architecture were “the outcome of the expression of the