A manera de conclusión de la categoría Construcción de acuerdos

This chapter acquaints the reader with Recife and its housing panorama from colonial times the eve of the outbreak of modernism . It outlines, in brief strokes, the general characteristics of colonial dwellings and settlements as well as the novelties which contributed to alter their contours from the mid-nineteenth century to the fourth decade of this century. From then on the geometrical bareness of modernism sifted down to the vernacular world and together with the ubiquitous block of flats, began to reshape, this time much more radically, the residential boroughs.

The necessity to include an introductory chapter to the housing panorama of Recife is also a consequence of the information available about these

buildings which determined that the paths for constructing the two bodies of data — the British and the Brazilian sample — should follow opposite directions. Whereas abundance of dated British plans allowed for an extensive examination of their spatial layouts before any attempt to define categories across time and class was undertaken no such material was available for houses in Recife. Specialised periodicals did not exist at the time, historical surveys on house plans were restricted to a few listed buildings and the compulsory submission of working plans to licensing offices was not introduced until well into the twentieth century. Besides, most of what

constituted the pre-modernist townscape had been erected by builders from makeshift plans, if any, which could not be located.

In order to overcome the problem it was decided that the plans that comprise the sample of pre-modernist houses of Recife would be restricted to those whose buildings had survived destruction at least as far as the mid-80 s, when a survey’* of dwelling buildings in areas developed from the mid-nineteenth century to the 30’s revealed the existence of over sixteen hundred houses located in and around the neighbourhood of Boa Vista and along the valleys of the rivers Capibaribe, Beberibe and Tejipio, former sites of country estates and

holiday residences. These buildings, by having been recorded in

photography and according to type of occupation on the plot, shape of built shell and stylistic treatment of main façade, allowed for a fairly accurate dating.

The strategy initially contemplated for constructing the data was to identify a representative sub-sample among the houses recorded In the referred survey and draw their plans on site. This task was spared when it was discovered that many of those buildings had had their plans sketched, from the first decades of this century onwards, for the purpose of being linked to the water supply and sewage systems and that a significant number of those drawings had survived time and neglect in the archives of the public office presently in charge of these services, as referred in chapter 1. The material, albeit

extensive, could not however be used on its own since the plans had all been drawn in loco , with no indication of time of construction and no elevations, sections or textual descriptions which might have helped a less chancy estimate of their age. Thus, it was decided that the plans collected from the cited archive would be those of the houses identified in the 1985-88 survey.

Therefore in order that colonial and post-colonial architecture can be

understood and the plans to be analysed in the next chapters assigned fairly accurate time niches, the study of pre-modernist dwellings departs from a general sketch of the main aspects that characterise, in morphological terms, these successive periods and their various guises. Furthermore, because the move from one period to the other is intimately associated with the process of urbanisation in Recife, a brief examination of this process will be attempted.

5.1. Earlier times

Recife is referred by Frei Vicente do Salvador’* in his Historia do Brasil (1500 a 1627) as a small village of two hundred people, the parish church of Corpo Santo, many grocery stores and taverns and the warehouses where the

sugar containers were stationed before being loaded on ships. The date of the author’s writings is uncertain but it is believed that his mention of sugar warehouses in the plural (which he terms as passos ) refers to the late

Salvador, Frei Vicente do. Historia do Brasil. Melhoramentos, Sao Paulo, 1965 (referred edition), p. 128.

sixteenth or early seventeenth century when sugar was already being produced in 66 mills in Pernambuco, according to Dantas Silva^^.

The Portuguese colony of Brazil was divided, soon after its discovery in 1500, into hereditary tracts of land, or captaincies — the capitanias — of which Pernambuco became one of the two main focus of sugar production and its capital Olinda, one of the most prosperous towns in the colony. The little harbour at the mouth of the river Beberibe and at the foot of the hill crowned by haughty Olinda soon ceased to offer satisfactory conditions for the flow of sugar exports. A little further south down the coast, a reef — arrecife or recife — running in a continuous line along the shore, defined a natural harbour of good proportion that met the needs of the sugar trade. The reef lent its designation to the hamlet developed around the port, clumped in the narrow strip of

swampy land, squeezed between the sea and the estuary formed by the rivers Capibaribe, Beberibe and Tejipio.

Thus, arising from the marshes, the so-called Povo do Recife (people of the reef), mainly inhabited by longshoremen and sailors, their families and camp- followers, blossomed amidst mangrove and white sand. An estimate seventy houses were, according to Mota Menezes’® found in the site by the Dutch invaders in 1631. These would have formed rows of low buildings already densely packed together and not nearly capable of accommodating the two sets of new-comers; the invaders and the people fleeing Olinda, set afire during the invasion struggles. Figure 5a shows the hamlet facing the reef and the village of Olinda in 163V*

The serious shortage of housing as well as of grounds led, at an early stage, to successive earthworks that would enlarge the narrow strip of soil and to the verticalization of the built environment. The tall buildings of Recife, depicted in sketches by Dutch artists a few years after the occupation, would, according to some authors, have been the precursors of the slim multistoried house

Silva, Leonardo Dantas. Recife: uma historia de cuatro séculos. Prefeitura do Reclfe-SEC, Recife. 1975, p.20

Menezes, José Lulz Mota, (editor). Atlas histôrico-cartoaràfico do Recife. FUNDAJ- Massangana, Recife, 1988, pp. 17-18.

Povo do Recife e Vila de Olinda, In Loureiro, Claudia & Amorim, Lulz. Uma cldade se inventa. Recife, 1994. (Orlg. Porto e Barra de Pernambuco In Atlas de J.TelxeIra Albermaz I, Portugallae Monuments Carthographica)

(sobrado magro) which surprised many a foreign traveller of later times. Oliveira and Galhano^ state that of the two hundred and ninety buildings recorded in Recife by the royal storekeeper after the Portuguese victory over the Dutch, around two hundred had two storeys and fifty others had three, all fully occupying the 4.8 to 7.4 meters wide frontages.

The lack of building space in Recife was partly overcome by the occupation of the island of Antonio Vaz (or llha dos Navios, as shown in the above referred map), located in the estuary of the three rivers, west of the peninsula. Chosen by Prince Maurice of Nassau, who arrived in Recife in 1637, as the site for erecting the Mauritzstaad — administrative centre of the Dutch State in Portuguese America — the semi-deserted island was drained, fortified and erected into what Robert Smith^ considers as the first settlement to deserve the denomination of city in the colony. The new settlement boasted broad regular thoroughfares, canals and embankments, gardens, two palaces and two bridges; a much awaited-for and disbelieved first bridge linking the huge span between the island and the peninsula, and another, at the opposite side, linking the island to the continent (figure 5b).“

Franz Post has depicted Mauritzstaad on canvas dated of 1657. Broad façades punctuated by many windows and doonways feature amidst the exuberant tropical vegetation. Hipped roofs alternate with stepped gables often associated with traditional Dutch architecture which, according to Smith*® was greatly modified or completely overruled due partly to climatic differences, partly to the influence of Luso-Brazilian models.

Although vestiges of the Dutch occupation can still be identified in the regular wide grid of some areas of the island which contrasts sharply with the labyrinth of winding lanes that form the old cores of most colonial towns and various parts of the present Recife, no buildings from the time of the Dutch has

knowingly survived. Whatever remained after the fierce struggle for expelling

Oliveira, Ernesto V. & Galhano, Fernando. Casas esouias do Porto e sobrados do Recife. Pool Ed., Recife, 1986, p.20.

Smith, Robert. Arquitetura civil no penodo colonial in Arouitetura Civil I.FAUUSP- MEC/SPHAN, Sâo Paulo. 1975, p. 137.

Cidade Maun'cia, 1648. In Loureiro&Amorin, op.cit. (orig. in Mapa do Recife by Cornelius Golijath).

the invaders was later demolished, reconstructed or altered beyond recognition.

To the southwest of the island successively known as llha dos Navios, Antonio Vaz, Mauritzstaad and (after the DutchJSanto Antonio, a new settlement began to take shape in the continent, facing Nassau’s summer residence, Palacio da

Boa Vista, from which what would constitute the first suburb of the city derived its name. Beyond this settlement, in the areas which comprise the bulk of the present city, along the valleys of the three rivers, sugar cane crops stretched amidst the exuberance of patches of sub-tropical forest, punctuated by little hamlets developed around sugar mills and warehouses, plantation seats and farmsteads, or along the roads linking these to the town centre.

Figure 5 c " shows the three settlements of the town in 1749 and in figure 5.d ” , it can be seen that in 1827 Boa Vista had development into the first suburb of the town. Figure 5.1 (c. 1876) gives a measure of the urban growth along the nineteenth century and shows various settlements scattered around the town, specially along the banks of the Capibaribe that winds its way

northwards in the centre of the map.

5.1.1. Im p re ssio n s

The former Povo do Recife albeit outshone by the refined urban treatment lavished over the administrative centre of Mauritzstaad, spanned the period of conquest (1630-54) as the economical centre of the Dutch State. An

obligatory route for the sugar production, for all goods coming in and out of the conquered capitanias and for the trade between these and the Dutch colonies in Africa, the old settlement also became a religious centre with its parish church fashioned into the invaders’ Calvinism and the first synagogue to be built in Latin America.

The next century brought in increased prestige, edification and grounds. Earthworks nearly tripled the narrow peninsula, new buildings included

Vila de Santo Antonio do Recife, in Loureiro&Amorin, op.cit., (orig. Plantagenogràfica da

Vils de Santo Antonio do Recife de Pernambuco, Arquivo Historico Ultramarino).

Idem, Cidade do Recife, (Orig. Plano do Porto e Praça de Pernambuco by Pedro Cronenberger).