Un parc científic i

(1945-1961).

I have placed the Garbe project in the sphere of influence of the “Survey of Portuguese Regional Architecture.” Its stance towards Algarve’s vernacular architecture and the way it surfaced in the design of a sophisticated hotel on the seaside can be best understood in the terms of that long-term project, which galvanised architectural culture in Portugal in the 1950s and 1960s. My discussion of the “Inquérito” will locate it within a lineage of related modernist initiatives to record vernacular buildings, and examine its contribution to metropolitan views of Algarve’s built environment.¹⁷⁷

Survey or weapon?

The idea of a detailed study of traditional buildings in Portugal was presented in 1945 by architect Fernando Távora (1923-2005).¹⁷⁸ In 1947, Keil do Amaral suggested a publication where specific elements of Portuguese folk architecture would be collected and classified to provide students and building agents with “the bases for an honest, living and healthy regionalism” and counter the widespread “embellishment of facades and interiors with typical decorations.”¹⁷⁹

177 A short version of this section was published as Ricardo Agarez, “Vernacular, Conservative, Modernist," in Surveys on Vernacular Architecture (Porto: ESAP-CEAA, 2012).

178 In a text republished in 1947 as O Problema da Casa Portuguesa (Lisboa: Tip. Imp. Libânio da Silva, 1947).

179 Francisco Keil do Amaral, "Uma Iniciativa Necessária," Arquitectura 20, no. 14 (1947).

After a failed attempt in 1949,¹⁸⁰ the Portuguese architects association (Sindicato Nacional dos Arquitectos, SNA) succeeded in launching the survey in 1955, with a grant from the ministry of public works. Six teams surveyed the breadth and length of the country (divided into six “zones”), following a loose set of criteria that included registering common materials and construction techniques, urban structures, and the influence of climatic, social and economic conditions over existing settlements.¹⁸¹ The resulting book, Arquitectura Popular em Portugal,¹⁸² did not appear until 1961.

The “Inquérito” and book followed years of debate among Portuguese architects about the place of national and regional traditions in modern architecture. The debate was fuelled by the growing popularity of Casa Portuguesa-inspired proposals in the 1940s and by the reaction of younger architects who saw these as conservative, decadent and superficial interpretations of tradition. It peaked in the first congress of Portuguese architects (1948), where several papers addressed the challenge of reconciling “tradition” and “regionalism” with progressive architecture and culture, rejecting official dictates on the matter: “The ‘Portugueseness’ of the work of Architecture may not be imposed further through the imitation of elements of the past.”¹⁸³

In this context, the government’s support for the survey may be seen as a sign of official concern at the architects’ determination to resist the establishment of national identity features. In fact, the 1955 decree defining its terms reads as a direct response to the architects’ 1948 proceedings:

“The government acknowledges the evolutional character of architecture, adjusting naturally to its time (…). But it also considers that new solutions should always rely on the traditions of national architecture, which result from peculiar climate conditions, construction materials, customs, living standards and the spiritual yearnings of the people, in short, from all the specific factors that (…) throughout the ages, have given them character and have created a sense for the phrase ‘national architecture’. (…) Many [solutions]

are still appropriate, nowadays, to the national environment and contain a useful living lesson for the intended Portuguesefication of modern architecture in our country.”¹⁸⁴

180 Cf. Francisco Silva Dias, "Keil do Amaral e o Inquérito à Arquitectura Regional Portuguesa," in Keil do Amaral (Lisboa: CML, 1999).

181 The antecedents and planning of the survey were detailed in Leal (2000), along with the non-architectural antecedents of the architects’ work, namely the agronomists’ “Inquérito à Habitação Rural,”

partly published in the 1940s.

182 Which I would translate as Folk Architecture in Portugal, although the 1988 edition, partly translated into English, used the title Popular Architecture in Portugal, conveying a sense that I find broader and potentially equivocal, and not as precise as Folk.

183 Sindicato Nacional dos Arquitectos, ed., 1º Congresso Nacional de Arquitectura (Lisboa: Sindicato Nacional dos Arquitectos, 1948), LXIII. On the importance of the 1948 congress, see e.g. Ana Tostões,

"Arquitectura Portuguesa do Século XX," in História da Arte Portuguesa (Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 1995), and ———, Os Verdes Anos na Arquitectura Portuguesa dos Anos 50 (Porto: FAUP, 1997).

184 Ministério das Obras Públicas, "Decreto-Lei n.º 40.349," in Diário da República I Série, 227, 19 October 1955 (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1955). My italics. POiA (Citation 26).

The government accepted architecture’s aesthetic and technical “evolution” but insisted on the relevance of a specific “national architecture,” past and present, and on the need to seek a

“Portuguese face” for architecture – against which the congress had voted – in the “living lessons”

of the country’s villages. This was an open-ended text that suggests backstage negotiations¹⁸⁵ and the officials’ willingness to support a thorough study of building traditions in exchange for their application in future architectural works. However, several authors maintain that the project’s central purpose, the architects’ “hidden agenda,” was to sabotage the government’s aims by presenting “a folk architecture that was no longer properly Portuguese but existed, in multiple and diverse expressions, in Portugal.”¹⁸⁶ Amaral put it clearly in his 1961 introduction:

“Portugal lacks unity in what concerns Architecture. There is not, absolutely not, one

‘Portuguese Architecture’ or one ‘casa portuguesa’. Between a village in Minho and a

‘monte’ in Alentejo, there are much deeper differences than between some Portuguese and Greek constructions.”¹⁸⁷

The country’s vernacular architecture would be essentially diverse, as varied as the many different geographic, climatic, topographic, material, technical, social and economic circumstances behind it. As such, it was irreducible to the regional formulas to which the vulgarisation of Raul Lino’s Casas Portuguesas had led. There was, the authors felt, more to regional adjustment than simple typification: stylising elements of a given region was but “an elementary way to conceive integration in pre-existing environments.” Lessons were to be had from folk architecture, “in coherence, seriousness, economy, ingenuity, functioning, beauty… that can largely contribute for the training of a contemporary architect.”¹⁸⁸

Furthermore, survey and book were symptoms among Portuguese architects of the

“revisionist movement” that originated in the Nordic countries, England and Italy and, as one surveyor put it, “firmly oppose[d] the schemes of modernist formalism,” which “blindly applied merely physical principles of functionalism to realisations thus divorced from the integrated thematic of ‘habitat’.”¹⁸⁹ In this sense the “Inquérito” would have been a key factor in redressing

185 Dias (1999) has pointed to how closer readings could identify different authors behind this text, suggesting its contents may have been negotiated between the government and the SNA.

186 Leal (2000), 176. The author elaborates on the meaningful difference between the initial designation of the project (“Survey of Portuguese Regional Architecture”) and the title finally adopted in the book (Folk Architecture in Portugal); the change from Portuguese to in Portugal expressed the survey architects’ will to consider this architecture not as representative of national (singular) identity but as scattered in many partial (plural) identities.

187 [Francisco Keil do Amaral], "Introdução," in Arquitectura Popular em Portugal, 3rd ed. (Lisboa: AAP, 1988 [1961]). POiA (Citation 27).

188 Ibid.

189 António Pinto de Freitas, "Tradicionalismo e Evolução," Arquitectura, no. 66 (1959): 35.

the relationship between vernacular and learned architecture in Portugal¹⁹⁰ and in the advancement of the latter as it influenced students of the Porto school of architecture in the 1960s.¹⁹¹

Summarising its significance for an ongoing dialog between architecture and anthropology, Leal noted how the survey presented a specific take, bound by precise purposes: for the

“Inquérito” architects, vernacular meant rural, removed from history, closer to nature, authentic and yet subaltern to erudite practices; above all, it allowed them to demonstrate that folk architecture was in fact modern.¹⁹² This point, a key issue for post-war Portuguese architects, was at the project’s inception: folk dwellings were “the most functional and least subject to fantasy” and those

“which best suit the new intentions,” Távora wrote, while Amaral was set to verify if “they are still the most adequate, functionally and economically.” With hindsight, participants admitted flaws in the initial criteria; social, cultural and ethnographic aspects were omitted, as were hybrid variations (“degenerations”) of vernacular elements and their transformation over time. Teotónio Pereira, for instance, acknowledged that although the survey’s conclusions “confirmed the falsity of the official stance,” they merely verified the initial thesis: a “cause and effect” link with the environment, the rationality and “authenticity” of materials and techniques, proving that “folk architecture was, like all ‘true architecture,’ functionality.”¹⁹³ The surveyors’ view was, in short, filtered through their specific agendas and, it now seems clear, was as significant for what it left out as for what it included.

Much has been made of the cleverness with which the “Inquérito” architects misled Salazar’s government into supporting their project only to obtain a subversive result in which vernacular traditions strengthened the stance of modern architecture rather than that of conservative regionalism.¹⁹⁴ Most contemporary accounts include anecdotes that stress the politicians’ surprise and discomfort at the work and at the architects’ sharp replies.¹⁹⁵ However, to the best of my knowledge, the circumstances surrounding the project’s appraisal by official agencies, both leading to its refusal in 1949 and its acceptance in 1955, have not yet been investigated – an essential step towards redressing the distortions that time might have produced: the conventional narrative by which a control-obsessed government was naïve enough to fully subsidise a project led by Amaral, Távora and Pereira (who were well-known critics of government policies and potential

“subversive” elements) seems, today, not totally convincing.

190 CF. Tostões (1997), 159-65, and Rodrigo Ollero Neves, “'Letter to Raul Lino'" (University of Salford, 2001).

191 Cf. the testimonies of former Porto students and surveyors in Leal (2000), 185-95, and António Menéres, "Keil e o Inquérito à Distância de 40 anos," in Keil do Amaral (Lisboa: CML, 1999).

192 Joa!o Leal, "Entre o Vernáculo e o Híbrido," Joelho. Revista de Cultura Arquitectónica, no. 2 (2011).

193 Nuno Teotónio Pereira, "Architettura popolare, dall'Inchiesta al progetto," Domus, no. 655 (1984):

29.

194 Cf. Nuno Portas, "A Evolução da Arquitectura Moderna em Portugal," in Bruno Zevi, História da Arquitectura Moderna (Lisboa: Arcádia, [1978]), 735-36.

195 See Dias (1999), Menéres (1999), and Leal (2000).

Without further research the intentions of the “Inquérito” and all its agents cannot be established.¹⁹⁶ It may be that the survey was seen as a means for architects to conduct a dialogue about modern architecture, when other forms of debate were resisted; it could have been a way for modernist architects, inspired by international examples but faced with the official fixation on national idiosyncrasy, to reach an understanding that would allow them to receive state commissions while expressing their own view. The state – represented in the process by the minister Arantes e Oliveira, whose openness towards modern architecture was apparent from the Hotel Sol e Mar case – may in these circumstances have been willing to support the architects’

proposal and wait for results. This was, after all, a timely opportunity to register a built environment that was fast disappearing under growing urbanisation, after previous government initiatives (e.g.

ethnographer Francisco Lage’s 1940 plan) had failed.

Spanish and Italian precedents

The set of lessons contained in vernacular architecture and its potential interest for modernist architects was surely not a new trope in 1945, when it became central to the Portuguese survey. An architecture “severely utilitarian in its use of materials and technology; functional in its adaptation to climate, accommodation of activities and utilization of site; and beautiful in its sculptural expressions of mass and volume as a result of manipulating the plan and section to accommodate users’ needs,”¹⁹⁷ is now understood to have been had essential influence in the development of modernism, particularly in Mediterranean-related contexts.¹⁹⁸ Since the 1920s, surveys of rural traditions in Spain and Italy played a major part in sustaining claims for modernism’s southern origins and in providing architects with an alternative, Mediterranean lineage for an allegedly universal, North-European construct.

In Spain, the pioneer modernist architects Fernando García Mercadal (1896-1985) and Josep Lluís Sert (1902-1983) had also looked for the primary sources of modern architecture in vernacular buildings – in a quest for a modernism before modernism, as it were –, highlighting their

“human” qualities (scale, material, technique, site-sensitiveness) as antidotes to the perceived excesses of modernism’s mechanical analogies. Theirs was a double purpose, shared by the Portuguese project twenty years later: to provide modernism with solid foundations and, simultaneously, to redress the artificiality of some of its original tenets by inserting natural and human factors. This critique within a defence, of modernism through vernacular traditions, gave rise to

196 The on-going research project “The Popular Architecture in Portugal. A Critical Look” (Porto: ESAP-CEAA, 2010-2013) might answer some of these questions.

197 Eleftherios Pavlides, "Architectural," in Oliver, ed. (1997), 13.

198 See Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino, eds., Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean (London: Routledge, 2010).

paradoxical arguments such as those around the use of ornament – another feature of the Spanish experience found in the Portuguese survey.

In his pioneering study of Spanish folk dwellings (1930), Mercadal contrasted their permanence, logic, objectivity and simplicity to the confusion, over-decoration and falsity of interwar regionalisms.¹⁹⁹ While architectural history studied only Spain’s monuments, Mercadal looked for examples of rationalism avant la lettre in buildings that perfectly translated function into form: “No aesthetic pretension, no scholastic or stylistic concern has inspired the villager; only his own well-being and the adequate use of local materials and construction systems.”²⁰⁰ In the Mediterranean house, modern architects would find layouts strictly dependent on the climate and decoration based not on stylistic knowledge but on spontaneous taste, stemming from the structure – not imposed upon it.

For Mercadal, decoration not only was part of vernacular buildings but also made them valuable sources for modernism. When describing traditional houses in Menorca (Balearics) he inverted the functionalist condemnation of ornament by regretting their “exceedingly uniform lines, lacking in expression, deprived of all decoration, without cantilevered balconies, porches or eaves.

They are something dead or too strange.”²⁰¹ Even though Mahón was referred to as “perhaps able to fulfil the aspirations of the most fanatical cubists,” his was not the enthusiastic description typical of other accounts of Mediterranean “Cubist” villages (such as Olhão). Decoration expressed the villagers’ “naturally inventive fantasy” and was part and parcel of Mediterranean traditions;

since it was likely to prompt contradictions in strictly modernist readings, it called for more elaborate interpretations.

This question resurfaced in Mercadal and Sert’s editorial initiative A.C. (1931-1937). The magazine is best known for a 1931 article comparing a row of houses in a Catalan coastal village to the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung, merely a more recent and erudite version of the “Standard” building solutions that, in that “vernacular” precursor, responded to primary needs on a human scale.²⁰² Yet in a 1935 issue entirely devoted to folk architecture, a sample of Andalusian villages formed a case study of the importance of ornament.²⁰³ The buildings and their simple patios “without style” were shown as inspiration for urban architecture, not because they were without decoration, but quite the contrary: city life had killed “all dwelling spiritualisation” and deprived the individual of the “first-necessity elements of life,” while villages kept them in a measured ornamentation, “derived from construction” and expressing its underlying “rational basis.”

199 Cf. Fernando García Mercadal and Antonio Bonet Correa, prologue, La casa popular en España (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1981 [1930]).

200 Mercadal ([1930]), 27.

201 Ibid., 54.

202 "Elementos 'Standard' en la construcción," A.C., no. 1 (1931).

203 "La arquitectura popular mediterránea," A.C., no. 18 (1935).

As evidence of the Mediterranean precedent for North European modernism (“spiritually,”

for Sert, “a return to pure, traditional forms of the Mediterranean”²⁰⁴), A.C. hailed Ibiza, “the island that needs no architectural renewal” because it lacked historical styles.²⁰⁵ In a 1936 monograph issue, German authors surveyed Ibiza’s rural dwellings²⁰⁶ using the semi-scientific approach (photography and accurate plans, sections and elevations) that, twenty years on, the “Inquérito”

architects applied. Mercadal and Sert used these examples, as did their later Portuguese counterparts, to critique the “folk-academic architecture” that retained only the village buildings’

picturesque and “unconsciously destroyed the principles on which they stand.”²⁰⁷ It is my understanding that by showing examples of simple, rationally-explained and structural decoration, A.C.

wanted to reach a compromise between the radical anti-decoration modernist tenets and the allegedly false academic regionalism; that is, to illustrate a middle ground between the two extremes, where there was place for individual, “lyric” elements as natural components of human habitat.

The other fundamental precedent for the Portuguese survey can be found in Italy, also in the mid-1930s, when Giuseppe Pagano (1896-1945) and Guarniero Daniel produced the exhibition of Mediterranean rural architecture at the VI Milan Triennale (1936), and its catalogue, Architettura rurale italiana.

Pagano and Daniel presented “the evolution stages” of rural houses and farming structures in Italy, Spain and North Africa through examples typologically ordered and collected in different climatic, geographic, economic and social contexts. Their aim was to show how these buildings came into existence, and why they were shaped as they were: their “plastic expression” was determined by the land, the sun, the materials used and user’s needs. “And it is through this way of expressing themselves, all but rhetoric, that rural houses, uncontaminated by mediocre, bourgeois architectural falsity, become so interesting in the eyes of the modern architect.”²⁰⁸

The “lessons” of vernacular traditions, central to the modernist understanding of folk architecture, were thus clearly laid out in Pagano’s campaign.²⁰⁹ As in contemporary Spanish investigations, and twenty years later in Portugal, themes such as normalisation, standardisation and repetition were identified with rural architecture, as positive predecessors of modernism. And as they exposed a universal argument – that rural architecture illustrated the preponderance of function over form, in any context – the authors also participated in the wider South European claim to the role of Mediterranean traditional buildings in the making of modernism: many of the

“most intelligent architects from the north,” they noted, had rediscovered “the emotion of the

204 Ibid.: 33.

205 "Ibiza, la isla que no necesita renovación arquitectónica." A.C., no. 6 (1932).

206 Raoul Haussmann and Erwin Heilbronner, "Elementos de la arquitectura rural en la isla de Ibiza,"

Ibid., no. 21 (1936).

207 "La arquitectura popular mediterránea," Ibid., no. 18 (1935): 15.

208 Giuseppe Pagano and Guarniero Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana (Milano: Ulrico Hoepli, 1936), 75.

209 Which comprised the catalogue and two previous articles in Casabella, nos. 95 and 96 (1935).

poet-builder” in the Italian rural house. The flat rooftops, the pure blocks with a minimum of projections and decoration, the horizontal window, the asymmetrical composition, the expression of mass walls, the influence of the surrounding landscape “and most of all the unprejudiced functional and technical coherence, are clearly legible in these works (…). Functionality has always been the logical foundation of architecture.” ²¹⁰

Despite the architect’s own claim to originality, Pagano’s initiatives belonged in a long lineage of interest in vernacular architecture in Italy.²¹¹ Yet Architettura Rurale’s influence extended to the post-war years, and was instrumental in the development of the so-called Italian neorealism in architecture. Amongst the multiple readings it has prompted, three points seem essential: Pagano’s moral stance, his political framework, and the consequences of his “populism”.

For Pagano, rural architecture encapsulated a set of moral values that should guide the modernist architect: to derive form from utilitarian purpose was an ethical question, more than an aesthetic one. The pragmatic rationalism of a farm building was morally sound, and superior to any formalism. Furthermore, Italy’s vernacular tradition and regional particularities were alternative, concrete expressions of the abstract notion of nationalism – more often expressed in the language of

For Pagano, rural architecture encapsulated a set of moral values that should guide the modernist architect: to derive form from utilitarian purpose was an ethical question, more than an aesthetic one. The pragmatic rationalism of a farm building was morally sound, and superior to any formalism. Furthermore, Italy’s vernacular tradition and regional particularities were alternative, concrete expressions of the abstract notion of nationalism – more often expressed in the language of