Grups de Recerca i projectes 2013‐2014

Raul Lino and the “smallness of Moorish things”

“Our first impression of the Algarvian landscape is its scale: small and gracious. With no important monuments or high mountains, the prevailing tone of all panoramas is modesty and delicacy (…) I always thought the landscape there had something of the feminine: in its scale, in the small size of natural forms (…) and no less in the shyness of the humble houses. (…) This was the Algarve that I loved.”¹

When Raul Lino (1879-1974) wrote these words for an Algarve-themed German magazine, he was eighty-eight years old. Lino was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century in Portugal, and one of the few to write as much as he practiced. In the late 1960s, with his national audience diminished, Lino presented his vision of Algarve to foreigners using the same terms he had been employing since the early 1900s to define Portuguese identity as a whole and, more specifically, the South: smallness, modesty, delicacy, humbleness – to which he added, for Algarve only, femininity.

Lino’s importance lies mainly in his role as the foremost proponent of the Casa Portuguesa campaign, in both words and buildings, between 1900 and the 1940s. Lino himself portrayed the campaign as a “last surge of romanticism” and a “nationalist reaction” against the “Babel” of eclectic, foreign influences in Portuguese architecture.² Triggered by an interrogation posed by anthropologist Paula e Oliveira in the 1880s – as to whether or not there was a traditional and characteristic type of Portuguese house –, the Casa Portuguesa quest quickly transferred to the sphere of architecture. What started as a scientific venture to collate surviving evidence of past practices became a matter of re-establishing the lost harmony of the built environment, through a set of standards for future constructions.

This shift from observation to design was largely the work of Lino. In 1902, archaeologist José Pessanha (1865-1939) admitted there existed no evidence of the “essential elements” that would “legitimise the theoretical fixation of a [past] Portuguese house” – but he did not doubt “the future existence of a Portuguese house” if the movement initiated by Lino was “intensified and generalised.”³ The architect, Pessanha wrote, had returned from Germany⁴ determined to fight the

1 Raul Lino, "Weiblich, klein und zierlich," Merian. Algarve, February 1968, 4, 6. GOiA (see Vol. II, Appendix 1, Citation 15).

2 Raul Lino, "Vicissitudes da Casa Portuguesa nos Últimos Cinquenta Anos," Ver e Crer, December 1945, 35.

3 José Pessanha, "Casa de Estilização Tradicional Portuguesa. Arquitecto Sr. Raul Lino," A Construção Moderna 3, no. 56 (1902): 19.

4 Where he studied in the Hannover Technische Hochschule with Albrecht Haupt before returning to Portugal in 1897, cf. Pedro Vieira de Almeida, "Raul Lino, Arquitecto Moderno," in Raul Lino (Lisboa:

Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1970), 120. Lino’s German education may account for his interest in the

stream of “bastardised chalets, pseudo-Norman abbeys, feudal castles, buildings of the most incoherent and absurd eclecticism” he found in Portugal. Lino had travelled his country analysing the traditional house types and suggested their “conscious and systematic evolution” through the combination of what he found “most characteristic, most original, most Portuguese, with the demands of contemporary life (…) in his attempt to nationalise architecture.”⁵

Key to Lino’s approach as an architect was this aim to produce new forms inspired by existing ones, and not archaeological replicas of the “old Portuguese home.”⁶ Free inspiration and not copy – the distinction was central in many of Lino’s texts, from the seminal A Nossa Casa (1918) to the best-seller Casas Portuguesas (1933), for there lay the true value of the architect-artist and what set him apart from the house builder or the client. These works were fierce pleas for the architect’s irreplaceable role in everyday life: for Lino, the “barbarism of constructions” that had swept through Portugal from the mid-1800s and “de-nationalised” architecture was due to owners and builders lacking “artistic education,” influenced by “certain French magazines, very popular in Lisbon.”⁷ The architect was the central agent in a return to the common sense of everyday construction, to the logic of popular knowledge expressed in vernacular terms – because “one must not address the people in a language it does not understand.”⁸ His remit was to supervise the craftsmen’s contribution, essential but in itself not enough for the task.

“Never ask in what style one shall build. It is logical to build in the style of the region. It is natural that local traditions are respected, that tried-and-tested skills are adopted, that surrounding materials are employed.”⁹

Raul Lino’s understanding of regional variation determined his Casa Portuguesa construct.

While other enquirers questioned the possibility of identifying a set of specifically Portuguese elements in domestic architecture, Lino endeavoured to pinpoint the features of old village buildings that, together, expressed essentially national character: a front porch (alpendre) and a generous chimney, glazed-tile panels (azulejos), the stone carving in exterior details and the soft curved section of the double tiled-roof eaves.¹⁰ However, with regional diversity underpinning national identity,¹¹ Lino preferred to explore the possibilities opened by the plural form (Casas Portuguesas) than to provide a single Portuguese formula. Regional traits included variations in construction techniques and materials, traditionally and “naturally” used by locals, that could become sources for metropolitan reinterpretation. In his books and articles, Lino offered drawn

concept of type, which he combined with a broader influence from Central European national romanticism movements.

5 Pessanha: 20.

6 "Arquitectura Pitoresca," A Construção Moderna 2, no. 25 (1901).

7 Raul Lino, A Nossa Casa, 3^rd ed. ([Lisboa]: [n. pub.], [1918]), 17.

8 Raul Lino, Casas Portuguesas (Lisboa: Livros Cotovia, 1992 [1933]), 51.

9 Lino ([1918]), 26-27. POiA (Citation 16).

10 Raul Lino, A Casa Portuguesa (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1929), 56-59.

11 An essential characteristic of Portuguese nationalism, cf. Joa!o Leal, Etnografias Portuguesas, 1870-1970 (Lisboa: Publicações Dom Quixote, 2000).

suggestions, both abstract and taken from concrete cases, of what houses in the different regions of Portugal might look like. Although insisting on how each case was different and claiming he did not wish to provide formulas,¹² these suggestions impacted strongly on construction-related spheres and made the Casa(s) Portuguesa(s) campaign extremely popular in the first decades of the century.

In the hands of architects, engineers and builders, such regional variations eventually became references for an eclectic “portuguesefication” of architecture, offering a panoramic view of the Portuguese cultural past to replace that of a foreign-influence past.¹³ Lino himself bitterly regretted the misunderstandings that had turned his proposals into yet another “tide of superficial fripperies,”¹⁴ a “slurred simulacrum of regionalist discourse”¹⁵ to feature in the menus of eclecticism. The creation had turned against its creator, and in the process Lino became lastingly associated with superficial, conservative regionalism in Portuguese architectural culture. In the 1930s, when he combined his critique of nineteenth-century styles with a declared opposition to international modernism which he saw as a passing vogue – “Corbusieresque experiments”

amounting to little more than “an opportunistic bazaar, already being lifted”¹⁶ – Lino’s conservative reputation was established; a reputation still prevalent today, despite scholarly work that has highlighted the contemporaneity of his architecture and the pioneering quality of his first houses.¹⁷

The South played an essential part in Raul Lino’s elaboration of Portugal’s building identity.

For his essay A Casa Portuguesa (1929), the architect drew on his own travelling notes from northern Morocco¹⁸ and southern Portugal to compose a historical observation of domestic architecture, both vernacular and erudite, concluding that its apex had been the late-gothic (Manuelino) and Mudéjar combined style, found in Alentejo since the fifteenth century. The “Mudéjar-Manuelina house of the South,” with its courtyards, galleries, conical and bulb domes, pointed, horseshoe and ogee arches, paired windows, and large-scale chimneys, perfectly represented the penetration of everyday building practice by oriental features. The “characteristic smallness of Moorish things”

and specific building techniques, materials, roofing solutions (terraces with external stairs), organic volume assemblages, intricate brickwork panels in parapets, grids and chimney tops – all converged to give this hybrid, picturesque style a “marked national character.”¹⁹ This was, I suggest, a useful, particularly well-defined variation of the Casa Portuguesa abstraction: it could be characterised by iconic elements and its originality – an essential axis of building identity – was easier to support, based on a hybrid of formal styles. Lino employed it in his proposal for a Portuguese pavilion in the

12 Lino ([1933]), 74-75.

13 Cf. Ana Vaz Milheiro, A Construção do Brasil (Porto: FAUP, 2005), 176.

14 Raul Lino, "Ainda as Casas Portuguesas," Panorama, September 1941, 9.

15 Lino ([1933]), 70.

16 Lino (1941), 10.

17 See, for instance, Almeida (1970), Rui Garcia Ramos, "Disponibilidade Moderna na Arquitectura Doméstica de Raul Lino…," in Revistas de Arquitectura (Lisboa: Caleidoscópio, 2011[a]), and ———, "A Perspectiva das Coisas," Monumentos, no. 31 (2011[b]).

18 Cf. Luís Forjaz Trigueiros, "Raul Lino," Bandarra, 28 September 1935, 3.

19 Lino (1929), 23-25.

1900 Paris world fair,²⁰ in some of his first house designs in Cascais and Estoril,²¹ and in his sketch for a “Traditional Portuguese Style House” (Vol. II, Appendix 2, fig. 25). The flexible Casa Portuguesa concept could be embodied in any of its derivates – and was best fulfilled, in the early 1900s, by the “South” house.

Lino did not consistently differentiate between Algarve and Alentejo types, preferring the generic “South” umbrella-term expressed through pared-down walls, Moorish arches and latticed louvres: his 1918 “House for the South Regions” (fig. 26) was an example of generic “sunshiny style” that suggested “the climate of our Algarve.”²² In the 1933 Casas Portuguesas, the Moorish slant gave way to the pastoral depiction of a “House in the South” with elements of the Alentejo vernacular such as the coloured plinth and archivolt, the wooden pergola and the round arch (fig.

27).²³ Lino was more specific in the “House for a Town in Algarve” (fig. 28), in whose description he seemed to share the then-widespread impression of Algarvian traditional features as intrinsically modernist: “By suppressing some of the stonework and by replacing the porch with a reinforced concrete slab, we would end up with a fashionably contemporary house. We would not, however, find it in any way beneficial – technically, economically or sentimentally.”²⁴ The Algarve example was the closest Lino came, in 1933, to illustrate what he called the “headless modern style, with its walls with no cornices, its columns with no capitals and its crownless porticos.”²⁵ His point, I believe, was that regional features were structural while modernism was superficial, and flawed.

Raul Lino had a few concrete building commissions in Algarve. His prototype for a

“Portuguese Hotel to be Built in the South,” commissioned by Sociedade de Propaganda de Portugal, was presented at Algarve’s first regional congress, in 1915, published in 1918²⁶ (fig. 29) and partly realised on the Rocha seafront in the 1930s, according to plans found in Lino’s archive²⁷ and to local newspapers.²⁸ The hotel was an opportunity for Lino to explore a novel problem in Portugal – accommodation in medium-large scale for moderate budget travellers. He saw this as an economic and architectural problem, appropriate for his Casa Portuguesa quest, since its solutions tended to display clear foreign influences: “We have much to learn from foreign hotels in their

20 Cf. Raquel Henriques da Silva, "Projecto do Pavilhão de Portugal para a Exposição Universal de Paris," in Arquitectura do Século XX. Portugal (Munique [etc.]: Prestel [etc.], [1998]).

21 The Monsalvat house, 1901, the first O’Neill house, 1902, the Silva Gomes house, 1902, and the Villa Tanger, 1903, cf. Almeida (1970).

22 “Casa para as regiões do Sul” in Lino ([1918]), 103-05.

23 “Casa no Sul” in Lino ([1933]).

24 “Casa numa cidade do Algarve” in Ibid.

25 Lino ([1933]), 78.

26 Raul Lino, "Hotel Português…," Revista de Turismo, no. 38 (1918).

27 ———, "Projecto de Hotel para a Praia da Rocha," n.d. (Lisbon-FCG/BA-RL186).

28 In 1933, the conclusion of a “monumental Palace Hotel, designed by the distinguished architect Raul Lino,” was deemed urgent to face growing demand for accommodation in the resort, cf. António J.

Magalhães Barros, "Carta da Rocha," O Algarve, 26 February 1933.

internal dispositions,” he wrote, but copying their external features would always result in an

“unpleasant, intrusive appearance.”²⁹

Therefore, Lino’s so-called “Solar-Hotel” was conceived specifically for Algarve’s coast but was considered appropriate to the entire coastline of south Portugal, with minor construction variations. Indeed, its whitewashed walls and tiled roofs, green lattice louvres, exposed brickwork, galleries and “chronicled” (i.e. lacelike) chimney tops matched the “Moorish” traits of the 1918

“House for the South regions”. Lino proposed to study “solar-hotels” for other tourism destinations in Portugal, and even though his Rocha design was never completed, the idea bore fruits: in 1933, Lino orchestrated the “Model Hotel” media campaign, an initiative whose brief developed the 1915 proposal³⁰ and, subsequently, inspired state-run hospitality structures.

Lino’s influence in national infrastructure programs, ranging from workers housing to tuberculosis treatment facilities, was also clear in school design. He designed the first kindergarten network, built from 1911 on, and regional types for elementary schools in 1917-1918 and 1935-1936. “To build is to educate”³¹ was a motto of the architect, whose countrywide school designs were part of an endeavour to inform popular taste “through the exhibition of the appropriate works” by the educated few.³²

The 1917 programme demanded “solid constructions, of simple but attractive appearance, and adjusted to each region’s climate and character,” to be built using local materials whenever possible.³³ In 1918, responding to a brief that chimed with his own ideas for domestic architecture (published that year), Raul Lino created three “models,” for the north, centre and south of Portugal.³⁴ One standard layout was given three different external arrangements, with variations not limited to decorative detail: different construction techniques and materials also meant different proportions in spans and openings, for instance, resulting in distinct buildings (figs. 30-31). The South type (fig. 32) followed Lino’s “Solar-Hotel” guidelines, namely the overall whitewash and the generous round arches enclosing the playground, and added one of the architect’s favourite elements of southern village architecture: the round-section buttresses supporting brickwork arches. The entire building would dispense with stonework (less common in the south) and brickwork lintels, parapets and steps were exposed (fig. 33), as Lino stressed, “always without dissimulation.” As deep-set romantic and admirer of the Arts & Crafts principles, Lino believed in the truthfulness of manual labour and traditional craftsmanship, and tried to enforce it in these

29 Raul Lino, Memória Justificativa e Descritiva de Um Projecto de Hotel… ([n.p.]: [n. pub.], [1915]), 7.

30 Cf. Ana Alves Pedro Ferreira, "A Importância do Arquitecto Raul Lino…," in Comunicações. 9º Congresso do Algarve (Silves: Racal Clube, 1997).

31 Lino ([1933]), 53, footnote 6.

32 Lino ([1918]), 12.

33 Ministério da Instrução Pública, "Decreto n.º 2.947," in Diário da República I Série, 11, 20 January 1917 (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional de Lisboa, 1917).

34 Raul Lino, "Escolas Primárias," 1918 (Lisbon-FCG/BA-RL60).

type-designs. “I am, above all, an enemy of the machine,” he still admitted in 1935, convinced that

“this is not the way to social justice.”³⁵

However, as far as I could determine, no school was realised using the 1918 South type. In 1935, Lino was commissioned by the state to design another three regional types, now for south Portugal only, based upon which thirty-two buildings were erected, three in Algarve.³⁶ The final version of the “Algarve type” (1936) included four classroom-number variations, on one and two floors. All types were designed “following the most typical features of building in each region,” as specifically determined by the public works minister,³⁷ which suggests how strongly the Casa Portuguesa discourse had penetrated official spheres; in fact, it was the acknowledgement of Lino’s

“specialisation” in “the study of the Casa Portuguesa” that led to his engagement by the ministry, in 1934.³⁸

The “Algarve type” was devised especially “for some parts of this province and of Alentejo where examples of ancient architecture with round-section buttresses remain, and also for those where one wishes to obtain an effect more characteristic and particular of these provinces.”³⁹ Thus while defending a geographical relation between type and context that was irrespective of administrative boundaries, Lino admitted using it concurrently as an instrument of aesthetic effect, undermining the coherence of his first intention.

The aesthetical drive was confirmed in the elevations’ folkloristic tint. The decoration and colour palette defined for the 1936 “Algarve type” (figs. 34-36), best illustrated in a painted card (fig. 35), configure a playful use of local or regional features. In these designs, as in the two Guerreiro houses Lino designed and built in Tavira between 1932 and 1934⁴⁰ (fig. 37), elements such as the round-section buttress or the V-shaped parapet grid could either be, or not be, associated with local use: rich in effects of volume, pattern and shadow, and more frequently found in the Alentejo tradition, they were nevertheless deemed appropriate to represent the “South” in any of its parts, as long as they were constructionally compatible. Raul Lino freely combined non-urban, traditional and preferably long-established elements guided mostly by the architect’s “good sense” towards local requirements; his was not a project of scientific rigour.

To some extent, Lino’s reputation as a conservative architect was reinforced when aesthetic concerns outweighed constructional rationale; yet it was due above all to his proximity to the Estado Novo stance, and to the correspondence between his discourse and that of the prime-minister and dictator António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970). Lino often praised the architecture

35 Trigueiros (1935), 3.

36 Cf. Filomena Beja et. al., Muitos Anos de Escolas, vol. I (Lisboa: Ministério da Educação, 1990), 236.

I identified two of these buildings, in São Clemente (Loulé) and Igreja Nova (Aljezur).

37 Raul Lino, "Edifícios para Escolas Primárias...," 1936 (Lisbon-FCG/BA-RL352).

38 (Lisbon-IHRU/DGEMN-DSARH-PESSOAL-0572/01).

39 Lino (1936), project statement, 1. My italics.

40 Raul Lino, "[Casa Unifamiliar], Tavira," 1932-1933 (Lisbon-FCG/BA-RL321).

of the European fascist regimes, the “noble severity” of Italian works⁴¹ and the expression of “the spiritual forces of the nation” found in German public works – an example, he suggested, for the Estado Novo administration.⁴² The discomfort caused by these sympathies in Portuguese architectural culture became apparent in the controversy around the monographic exhibition dedicated to Raul Lino in 1970, which the elite of post-war architects received with indignation⁴³ and provoked much debate in subsequent years.⁴⁴

My last example of Lino’s works – the Bairro Operário in Portimão, a housing scheme designed in 1934 for the canning industry workforce of Algarve’s second fishing centre – was a good instance of the synchronisation of those discourses. The construction of low-income housing was central to Estado Novo’s socio-political control policies (see Chapter 3): “For the benefit of our independent temper and our ordered, cautious simplicity,” Salazar wrote, “we covet the small cottage, independent, inhabited and owned by the family in freehold.”⁴⁵ In Casas Portuguesas, published in the same year as a new law regulating low-income housing promotion,⁴⁶ Lino praised the advantages of single-family, independently-owned housing: “Neither the Americanisation of customs nor the collectivist tendencies of recent organisations have succeeded in quelling Man’s natural and instinctive aspiration for his own, independent family residence. (…) Let us facilitate the fulfilment of that very human dream (…) [of a house] accordant with our features, and addressed to our taste; stronghold of our intimacy, last refuge of the individual against the assault of all the anomalies of collectivism.”⁴⁷

The correspondence between Lino’s thinking and official discourse became clear with the realisation of the first batch of low-income housing schemes, following the 1933 law. The bairros in Portimão, Olhão, Setúbal and Matosinhos were all based on the repetition of minimum, one-floor single-family units, developed by the canning industry consortium for its employees and funded by the state.⁴⁸ The Portimão scheme had already been commenced, on canning industrialist Cayetano Feu’s private initiative, and therefore was the series’ first: in 1934 the state bought the land and the unfinished structures from Feu, possibly thanks to the direct intervention of Salazar himself,⁴⁹ and

The correspondence between Lino’s thinking and official discourse became clear with the realisation of the first batch of low-income housing schemes, following the 1933 law. The bairros in Portimão, Olhão, Setúbal and Matosinhos were all based on the repetition of minimum, one-floor single-family units, developed by the canning industry consortium for its employees and funded by the state.⁴⁸ The Portimão scheme had already been commenced, on canning industrialist Cayetano Feu’s private initiative, and therefore was the series’ first: in 1934 the state bought the land and the unfinished structures from Feu, possibly thanks to the direct intervention of Salazar himself,⁴⁹ and