From the Late 19th Century House Question to Social Housing Programs in the 30s: the Nationalist Regulation of the Picturesque in Portugal

Journal 51 With the support of MODERN HOUSING PATRIMONIO VIVO MODERN HOUSING PATRIMONIO VIVO International committee for documentation and conservation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the modern movement Journal 51 – 2014/02 docomomo International is a non-profit organization dedicated to the documentation and conservation of buildings, sites and neighborhoods of the modern movement. 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FRIEDMAN Modern Housing Envisaged as a Patrimonio Vivo (Living Heritage) — BY JOSEP MARIA MONTANER Modern Housing: Heritage and Vitality — BY JOSEP MARIA MONTANER AND ZAIDA MUXÍ MARTÍNEZ Citizen Activation in Contemporary Collective Housing. Barcelona Experiences — BY ISABEL APARICI TURRADO How to Deal with Halen Estate —BY BERNHARD FURRER Santa María Micaela Housing Cooperative in Valencia: a Critical Assimilation of the Modern Legacy —BY CARMEN JORDÁ AND MAITE PALOMARES Social Housing in the 60s in São Paulo — BY MARIA LUIZA SANVITTO El Tunal Experimental: 40 Years Later an Experimental Housing Project in Bogotá, Colombia, 1972 — BY RAMÓN BERMUDEZ, JOSÉ ROBERTO BERMUDEZ, DANIELA SANJINÉS From the Late 19th Century House Question to Social Housing Programmes in the 30s: the Nationalist Regulation of the Picturesque in Portugal — BY RUI JORGE GARCIA RAMOS, ELISEU GONÇALVES AND SÉRGIO DIAS SILVA Paradigms of Social Housing in Buenos Aires. Lessons From Juan XXIII — BY SOLEDAD ARMADA The Preservation of Authenticity and the Awareness of the Necessary — BY LUCIANA ROCHA Women in Modern Neighborhoods: Margarete Schütte–Lihotzky; Jakoba Mulder, Lotte Stam-Beese; and Carmen Portinho —BY ZAIDA MUXÍ MARTÍNEZ NEWS BOOK REVIEWS APPENDIX ESSAYS DOCUMENTATION ISSUES 02 EDITORIAL 04 LECTURE 12 10 74 16 68 28 34 22 54 40 60 48 80 85 89 94 96 60 Essays docomomo 51 - 2014/2 The old picturesque city of Olhão © Colecção Estúdio Mário Novais. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Biblioteca de Arte. 61 Essays docomomo 51 - 2014/2 In the early 20th century in Portugal, a new architecture was produced as the offspring of different references, conforming to a process of “Portugueseness” based on the picturesque. From the beginning of the dictatorship in 1926, the State took advantage of that phenomenon to sublimate nationalist values. Through the first programs of mass housing construction, the single-family house became an object of consumption and a cornerstone of national identity. The search for identity brings together different architectures across the century featuring a renewed Portuguese sentiment infused with different perspectives on the “homeland”, its history and its culture. From the Late 19th Century House Question to Social Housing Programs in the 30s: the Nationalist Regulation of the Picturesque in Portugal BY RUI JORGE GARCIA RAMOS, ELISEU GONÇALVES AND SÉRGIO DIAS SILVA ESSAYS On Transition In the early years of the 20th century in Portugal, amid debates over national identities and modernity, a new architecture was produced as the offspring of different sentiments including iconic sources such as the Casa Portuguesa (Portuguese House), reference to the chalet or the modernist approach. These hybrid proposals had to deal with the selection of formal elements and visual memories according to epochal architectural design systems of inclusion and exclusion. Regardless of the results, they conformed to a process of “Portugueseness” based on the mainly English picturesque1 character firstly introduced into Portugal by intellectuals not necessarily connected to the State intelligentsia. Even in the Primeira República (First Republican regime after the end of the Monarchy in 1910) but, particularly, when the dictatorial regime was imposed in 1926, the State took advantage of that cultural phenomenon to sublimate nationalist values. Therefore, the first Act issued by the government, which successfully achieved large-scale low-income housing programs in the main cities, appeared in 1933, the year the dictatorship consolidated the constitution of a corporative authoritarian regime — Estado Novo (New State). Throughout most of the last century, the State, facing profound social asymmetries, poverty and deplorable living conditions, developed a set of public programs that promoted affordable houses in different forms, raising a need for different architectural responses to housing design. The transition from the widespread late 19th century private house (for the bourgeoisie or working classes) to Estado Novo social housing programs was realized in five working-class neighborhoods built between 1919 and 1922 by the Primeira República regime. It can be considered a major change, which aggregated new urban and domestic space legislation and a political setting, dominated by totalitarianism and the affirmation of a strong national identity. The climax was reached when the corporative State introduced different measures for space and resident control, in particular, building social houses and transferring land property rights to the new owners. With the first social housing program announced only in 1933, a broader reflection of the low-cost housing problem was started, reframing the issue of national identity from the fragile experience of modern architecture’s specific point of view. That cultural and political ambivalence, which reflects the conflict of being simultaneously Portuguese and modern, corresponded to a new setting for social housing and new urbanization solutions. This circumstance was matched with the first approach to mass housing production throughout Portugal, the development of design methods in order to standardize housing, the application of comfort and hygiene principles, the implementation of new strategies in land planning, as well as the creation of administrative and economic organizations as levers to build social housing and to establish new areas for expansion in cities. Although these subjects assumed the form of an authoritarian power, Pedro Vieira de Almeida (1933– 2011) argues that, in an underdeveloped country, they also provided a true practical experience for a wide range of practitioners2. Among them, some engineers and architects were involved or particularly interested in issues pertaining to modern architecture in addition to their main effort to propose pragmatic solutions against slums. Therefore, the approach to social housing design did not prevent the natural and fundamental discussion about modernity or the aspirations of inhabitants regarding hygienic and comfortable homes. This discussion occurred under the transverseissue of the interchanging process between chalet and Casa Portuguesa architecture. 62 Essays docomomo 51 - 2014/2 In this way, in order to study Portuguese housing architecture in the 20th century it is relevant to understand the dynamics of hygienism or new home comfort standards, the approach to the relationship between interior and exterior space, or the arrangement of space to obtain minimum areas. It is particularly significant to analyze some experiments that took place when large bourgeois house resources were interchanged with standard popular house features. This approach brought out new practices including, for the first time, the idea of the house as an object of mass consumption. Connected to this point was the effort to fix rules and an order through administrative regulations. At the end of 19th century, the national department of health created central authorities to develop a wide set of legislative measures with regard to housing, whose pinnacle was the Regulamento de Salubridade das Construções Urbanas (Urban Building Health Regulation) published in 19033. As Carlos Sambricio (1945–) mentions, this transition period of impure solutions doesn’t prevent the identification of the deep roots of the modern architecture experience. For the first time in the western world, social architecture as an extended phenomenon was designed for a specific program, under a limited budget and to be built through precise processes, anchored in new words like economy, society and salubrity4. The Casa Portuguesa or the chalet, and even their hybrid variations (more or less modernized and destined for every economic and social stratum), can be pointed out as the first examples interpreted as mass consumer objects. Besides the subjection to the mechanisms of production, repetition and transaction, the house was no longer eternal in terms of use and users. These new conditions were decisive for the modern configuration of domestic space and furthermore for the architectural design project. The inclusion of architecture in the sphere of consumption objects is the prerequisite for popular and general acceptance of a new or reformed house. This fact, not always explicit, exceeds the understanding of the house design solely as an architectural issue. For example, it corresponds to the initiative of building “affordable houses” by building societies like the Companhia de Crédito Edificadora Portuguesa, which in 1920 presented a kind of catalogue with different house types and dimensions described as “national stylization”. After 1918, in the belief that the State should not be the sole entity responsible for solving the housing shortage, the establishment of subsidised loans by national legislation encouraged initiatives to build affordable houses for the working class. Also in 1928 (Salazar was already a minister under the twoyear old dictatorship) there was still an effort to promote and to subsidize the private sector to construct cheap houses or to reduce room and house rents for the middle and lower classes. Like other legislation regarding the rent regime, land expropriations or cooperative enterprises, all these legal acts should be understood during those first years as decisive tools for house commoditization. In that context we must consider the house not just as a product but also as an architectural project vehicle related to real estate practices and typological investigations. All these phenomena should draw some attention to often ignored projects such as “Houses with 5, 6 and 9 rooms for the South” designed by the architect Cottinelli Telmo (1897-1948) in the early thirties5. Intrinsic to philanthropic, industrial patronage or insurance companies’ initiatives, these solutions suggest a timid but nonetheless remarkable policy to support affordable housing construction for the poorer classes by the private sector. On Program After the military coup that ended the Primeira República in 1926, the new dictatorship decided to terminate the social housing initiatives of the previous regime. The Estado Novo distanced itself from those initiatives, but completed the neighborhoods already under construction and recovered part of the groundbreaking legislation from 1918 (Decree no. 4,137 and, from 1926, no. 16,055 and 16,085)6. From the outset, the totalitarian state established an intricate bureaucratic network and issued laws prolifically in order to supervise daily life, namely in terms of political mobilization (União Nacional, 1930), monuments and public buildings (dgemn, Direcção-Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais — General Directorate of National Buildings and Monuments, 1929) and their protection areas (1932), good taste and fine arts (Conselho Superior de Belas Artes, 1932), urban renting and expropriation regime (1928), urban improvement works (1932) and housing programs (1933). Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970) and his minister Duarte Pacheco (1900–1943) sought a solution for the social ill-health of urban areas by means of laws supporting private and public-private initiatives in social housing; in the belief the State should not develop these initiatives alone. Those endeavors failed to boost housing construction and in 1933 a new line was chosen, with the first Affordable Houses program (Decree-Law 23,052) and the direct intervention of the State in financing and managing housing. This program was based on a kind of single-family house with a Portuguese feel, in different areas according to social status and under a rent to own system. The house then became a fundamental factor in the development of a cult of the nation, a strong state and a corporative structure, the corollary of the institutionalization of the Estado Novo7. The neighborhoods built under this program resorted to a set of nationalist repertoires, from national history and built heritage to popular tradition, producing and consuming new conformations to those cultural assets8. The intervention of the State in social housing was seen as an instrument of power and the house and the neighbourhood as the aim of its strategy. The way that Salazar modeled the house as a cornerstone of national identity and a core aspect of his political action that never changed9 should be emphasized. In an interview with António Ferro (1895–1956), Salazar stated: “working one’s own land is the great enemy of the tavern”10. This statement was made in 1938 while strolling through the newly finished neighborhood of Affordable Houses in Alto da Ajuda, in Lisbon, and sheds some light on the manipulation of house and ownership as a prophylactic measure targeting undesirable social behaviors, as the promise of 63 Essays docomomo 51 - 2014/2 01–03 Row houses in Oliveira Monteiro Street, Oporto, 1898; Rodrigo Teixeira Mendes d’Abreu neighborhood, Oporto, 1907. © Câmara Municipal do Porto. Divisão de Arquivo Histórico. 64 Essays docomomo 51 - 2014/2 ownership was linked to acceptable political and social conduct. Salazar feared the people as a social group that, if set in motion, could not be stopped, and so the adoption of a regime of small proprietors controlled by the state made sense. Simultaneously, the choice for the single-family house reflects the opposition to the bad influence of the large workers’ phalansteries, the equivalent of having the people agglomerated in multifamily housing buildings. In the words of Salazar, the house is the great enemy of the revolution: “It would be possibly easier to solve the housing problem in the vertical way, in the immense block. But the small independent house, and the quiet, the tranquility, the love, the righteous feeling of ownership, the family. The hive is promiscuity, revolution, hate, simultaneously in the individual and in the crowd.”11 This growing fear of the people can be seen in the reorientation of the state’s identity discourse from that of the late 19th century, based on picturesque national culture, to a focus on a nationalist historical construction represented by its monuments12. The search for identity in architecture was therefore based more on setting up a historical artifact through a selection of collective memories rather than in its scientific and architectural confirmation. This confirmation had always been hesitant, since the first inquiries in the 19th century and in the transition to the 20th century13. A truly Portuguese origin that could unite all that was sought and wished for, and it is only with Orlando Ribeiro (1911–1997) that our diversity is definitely assumed (1945) and, later, confirmed, when José Mattoso (1933–) describes Portugal as a community of parts: “A country made of pieces that nothing can unify. It happens not only in socioeconomic structures, but also in cultural concerns, whose “norm” is the “discontinuity of generational leaps”14. The program of Affordable Houses moved the Portuguese House, manipulated according to its principles, into the State’s sphere of influence, using the small house and its picturesque features as a means of identity validation. This house that, as we have seen, was one of the inputs into the architectural problem of housing in the early years of the 20th century, then became a stereotype of the Portuguese House that should look like a house, much as a castle should look like a castle. This architecture of images was never intended to reproduce an authentic historical era, as that reproduction would not satisfy the needs of contemporary life. It intended, instead, to evoke a certain kind of homely environment, a solid domesticity of the house much as described by Bachelard (1884–1962), an environment we connote to our familiar past and to the image we carry of a primordial primitive house: “In a way, this should also be similar to speaking of a metonymic logic, according to which a single remnant of the past is more meaningful than a supposed recovery of its integrity (which will, actually, never be more than a sham)”15. It is, in fact, this purpose that would guide, from 1929, the work of the dgemn in the reconstruction of a monumental heritage in ruins as part of the reinforcement of a cult of the nation, where the monument fully understood by all legitimizes its role in the recognition of a national identity. The work of the dgemn on heritage may therefore be described as the transformation of the building or of its ruins into a product which can be easily classifiable historically and promptly consumed. This eloquent action is visible in photos of the time, such as those of the construction of Paço dos Duques in Guimarães (Rogério de Azevedo, 1934), with a method repeatedly disavowed in texts and interventions by Raul Lino (1878–1974).16 It is also this metonymic side that brings together different architectures across the century. These architectures, whichever their style, feature a renewed Portuguese sentiment infused with different ways to see the “community”, its history and its culture (see Raul Lino, Keil do Amaral, Fernando Távora, Teotónio Pereira). But the success of the Portuguese House as an operation of identity, reinforced by nationalist practice and the Affordable Houses program, also shows the impoverishment of that perspective, exposing its problematic and discredited side in the appropriation of Popular Culture. On Fragility The debate concerning a national identity forged by romantic intellectuals of the 19th century and, later, through ethno-genealogical research, which deepened the material and immaterial domains of its representation in popular culture17, would be decisive for the nationalist character of the Primeira República. But the “role of republican indoctrination and propaganda in the production of the fundamental ingredients of the end of the century Portuguese nationalism”18 was not only decisive in improving the republican position, as it also allowed the creation of different national identity discourses in the following decades. The fundamental symbols and rituals of the nation were conceived throughout the Primeira República and they would be ideologically absorbed by the totalitarian nationalist regime imposed after the military coup in 1926. Therefore, the new political system granted a sense of “national regeneration”, recovering from the conservative right of the early 20th century aspects such as the Lusitanian Integralism and the catholic movement19. After 1933, the Estado Novo maintained this appropriation, regulating it and placing it at the center of its action, entangled with the parochialism typical of the dictator Salazar. Until the sixties, the ferocity of national identity topics led to an “inability (or refusal) to consider their own culture in the big picture”20 which meant, in architecture, production based on image and determined by personal talents21. These architectures, by recognizing their fragility, implicitly or explicitly, valued a kind of pastoral ideal linked to rurality, fluctuating between modern and regional, or taking historicist tendencies forwards to a monumental architecture. Mapping those circumstances until 1950, meant tacitly accepting the possibility of a regional architecture, that is, a contemporary and heterogeneous transformation of the previous “Portuguese Style”22: a hybrid and modernizing one, generally known as “Português Suave”. Over and above the recognition of the mass spread of the “Casa Portuguesa” 65 Essays docomomo 51 - 2014/2 04 Exhibition of the Portuguese World, Portuguese Villages Section (Alentejo), Lisbon, 1940. © Estúdio Horácio Novais, 1938–1939. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Biblioteca de Arte. 05 Illustration named “A Assistência Social” (The Social Assistance) with a photo of the Dr. Oliveira Salazar neighborhood (Paulino Montez, Lisbon, 1936) from the Affordable Houses Program. © Biblioteca Nacional, BN, in Leitão de Barros (dir.), Domingos Alvão (fotogr.), Portugal 1940, Lisboa, Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional, 1940. 06 Affordable Houses Program: Madre de Deus neighborhood (Luís Benavente, Lisbon, 1938). © Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa. Arquivo Fotográfico. 07–08 Affordable Houses Program: Paranhos neighborhood, Oporto, 1937. © Instituto da Habitação e da Reabilitação Urbana, IHRU.