1960s Kubler and the Revolution
In the essay “Arquitectura Não Alinhada” (2001)—translated from the Portuguese as “Non-Aligned Architecture”—the architectural historian Paulo Varela Gomes summarizes the reception, and to some extent the instrumentalisation, of the book Portuguese Portuguese Plain Architecture: Between Spices and Diamonds, 1521–1706 (1972) by the architectural field in Portugal since the 1970s until the early twenty-first century. To Varela Gomes: “the ideological aspiration satisfied by Kubler’s book was, up to a point, allowing us to appreciate in a positive way (strong, full, autonomous, coherent and closed) some buildings or building compounds that could not obviously fit the canonical categories of European historiography, the renaissance, mannerism, the baroque. The ‘poverty’ (constructive, material, decorative, compositional, and of façade design), that seemed to stigmatize so many convents and churches in Portugal, was suddenly redeemed (and simultaneously de-Europeanised) in a decade, the 1970s, in which Portugal was searching for a political autonomy of a peripheral nature.” (2001, 6)
Kubler’s thesis implied that the nature of Portuguese architecture built between 1600 and 1800 did not fit in any of the established categories of art history, since he noted that his main interest in studying the Portuguese case had to do with its difficult categorization following conventional separation by style and time: “The various histories of Portuguese architecture, like most histories of art, all are written on the assumption that period, place, and style are interchangeable: at any given place in any defined period, it is assumed that there exists only one style. Thus, Mannerism is taken as the style of the sixteenth century in Europe; Baroque style fills the seventeenth century. By this venerable system, which is at least as old as Vitruvius and Pliny, one place at one period can have no more than one ‘style.’” (Kubler 1972, 4)
Kubler defined a new category, Portuguese plain architecture, and characterised it as austere, simple, pure, manifesting essential architectural properties. This seemed to have a causal connection with the economic and political context of the time—a period of crisis between spices and diamonds, that is between the two moments that allowed the Portuguese empire to colonise a substantial part of the world—that called for understated buildings, and the optimal use of scarce resources for great effect. More importantly, Portuguese plain was a hybrid between erudite and popular architecture, since “The Portuguese plain style is like a vernacular architecture, related to living dialect traditions more than to the great authors of the remote past” (Kubler 1972, 3). Thus, In the 1970s, Kubler’s book informed retroactively the context of contemporary architectural production, connecting it to a longer genealogy, in which the essential characteristics of architecture were indelibly connected to the Portuguese territory, and to some extent connected to an idea of national architecture.
Despite being published in 1972, Kubler did most of the research work in Portugal between the end of the 1950s and the 1960s. Before this, Kubler had written a thesis about the religious architecture of New Mexico, in the United States—later published as a book in 1940 and reedited in 1972. Thus, it is relevant to note some parallels between these two places, the state of New Mexico and Portugal at the time. When Kubler began the study of their architecture, these two places were relatively recent states in the midst of establishing regional and national identities legitimised by popular art and regional architecture. The State of New Mexico had been admitted to the union in 1912, and the development of a new image is apparent in the architectural and artistic productions of the following decades—Kubler studied and photographed the Franciscan missions of the seventeenth century in the 1930s, a time when these buildings were already part of twentieth century culture and the construction of the image of the state of New Mexico closely connected with the style that would become known as pueblo revival (Wilson 1997). Similarly, in Portugal, the dictatorial regime denominated New State—Estado Novo, in Portuguese—was established in 1933 and even in the 1950s, when Kubler stayed in the country, he witnessed a strong propaganda campaign invested in recovering or inventing traditions to promote the image of the country through the arts.
In both places, New Mexico and Portugal, Kubler studied the architectural production, mostly religious buildings erected in the seventeenth century, in which “the lack of resources was used to great effect,” to construct buildings that had a modern character, and that would be analysed in the present to create a cross-cut temporal connection between the historical moment and the present. If in New Mexico, Kubler could see all the pueblo revival museums and hotels built in Santa Fe that were replicas and iterations of the Spanish Missions. Furthermore, in Portugal, Kubler compared the structural simplicity of historical buildings with twentieth century buildings: “The effect at Jerónimos in Belém, at Arronches, or at Freixo de Espada à Cinta was not unlike the mushroom columns in twentieth-century reinforced concrete construction as used under curved shells” (Kubler 1972, 30).
By studying historical objects brought from the past as the origins of new traditions, Kubler’s case studies allowed him to understand retrospectively the framing of a series of objects that were used as modern revivalist motifs. This perspective allowed him to propose a new classification of art history, as the history of all things, based on seriation of formal sequences that could comprise different durations as well as map the large tapestry of historical connections through time (Sousa Santos 2020). This thesis was published in the book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), that briefly put Kubler as a cult figure to a new generation of artists in the 1960s such as Robert Morris, Robert Smithson and John Baldessari (Lee 2001).
Notwithstanding most of Kubler’s work about Portuguese plain architecture having been produced essentially in the 1950s and 1960s, the publication of his book was long delayed. This apparent set back allowed for its reception to occur within a different political context, after the toppling of the long dictatorship by the 1974 revolution, thus becoming associated within Portuguese art historiography with the revolutionary period.
1970s Post-Revolution
Two years after the 1974 Revolution in Portugal the French magazine Architecture d’Aujourd’hui dedicated an issue to the architectural production in Portugal. Álvaro Siza is the only architect mentioned in the cover, with the title “La Passion de Álvaro Siza”, presenting him as one of the “great architects of the new European generation
[…] In his modestly dimensioned work, he makes an effort to respect the Portuguese paucity of economic means, without abdicating the refined culture and spatial poetics that not one photograph manages to show”1 (Anon 1976, 42). In the same magazine, the architect Gonçalo Byrne announces that Siza is the bastion of a new architecture by young people that were trying to clash with the international dominant currents, such as the International Style or Brutalism, through austere and clean spaces (Byrne 1974, 32)2 For Byrne, that attitude was already present in Siza’s work, since the adoption of “minimalist poetics”, references to modernist aesthetics of the 1920s, that were at the time disconnected from the official architectural principles of the regime (Byrne 1974, 32).3
In the same issue, Vittorio Gregotti and Oriol Bohigas write the apology “La Passion d’Álvaro Siza”, a text where they both refer to collage as a design method, and Gregotti compares Siza to Robert Venturi, saying that Siza, in a project for social housing in Caxinas, quotes and refers to the “most elaborate Modern culture: that of Mackintosh and of the first nationalism of Man of Aran”4 (1976, 42). It is telling that Gregotti refers to a primitivist ethno-fiction film by Robert Flaherty, Man of Aran (1934), a film that constructed fictionally, rather than documented, the harsh lives of a fishing community in the Aran Islands in Ireland.5 Bohigas finishes his statement by issuing a vote of confidence of the SAAL process—a series of architectural brigades that continued the building of social housing during the post-revolutionary period—as something that could evolve to be integrated with mass housing production and create significant urban transformations (1976, 42).6
1980s The Third Way
Unfortunately, Bohigas was far from predicting the future. During the 1980s and 1990s, the urgent quest for building social housing was traded by the necessity of representation, and Álvaro Siza was adopted as the architect who represented Portugal’s young democracy.
In 1980, Eduardo Souto de Moura published a text, in the magazine 9H, in homage to Siza entitled “An ‘Amoral’ Architect.” He summarizes Siza’s practice quoting the poet Helberto Helder and presenting the design process as a sequence of actions: “The pencil encloses a space—the site appears. […] The place is geometry. The project emerges. […] The difference is conflict. The work is born. We witness ‘the resurrection of what was dying, and dies and will die.’ Then the place is” (1980, 12). Only four years after the activism of the issue of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Souto de Moura’s text presents Siza’s work in the abstract field of works of art.
In the same issue of 9H, Robert Maxwell writes an essay proposing a “third way”: “The ideology arises when the wish for assurance exceeds the evidence to provide it. We may suspect that in order to avoid errors which are essentially those of serving the predominant western ideology of capitalism, we shall be offered as alternative a prescription which falls into other errors, the errors which are produced under a marxist or proletarian ideology…” (Maxwell 1980, 31). To some extent, Maxwell predicted the context of the next decades.
If Kenneth Frampton did not formally verbalise, like Maxwell, the correspondence between the third way and Critical Regionalism, he was very clear when he proposed: “Architecture can only be sustained today as a critical practice if it assumes an arrière-garde position, that is to say, one which distances itself equally from the Enlightenment myth of progress and from a reactionary, unrealistic impulse to return to the architectonic forms of the preindustrial past” (Frampton 1988, 20).7
The rise of Portuguese architecture internationally occurred in parallel with the expansion of third way politics and neoliberal policies, accompanying the end of welfare and social housing policies in Europe. For the architects of the generation of Álvaro Siza, this was a disappointment. In the essay dedicated to Siza, on the occasion of his Pritzker prize award in 1992, Vittorio Gregotti writes about the many disillusions that were nonetheless met with professional success: “Only five days had gone by after April 28, 1974 (the date of the revolution of the carnations), when, without encountering guards or bailiffs, I entered the office of the new Minister of Public Works, my friend Nuno Portas. Seated in a pompous armchair in that grand office was Alvaro Siza. He started explaining to me the work plan of the SAAL brigades, spontaneous cooperatives of planning and building. The new political opportunity seemed to have transformed his usual patience into great energy. Then, after great hopes came disappointments” (Gregotti 1992).
1990s Kubler Returns
In Potugal, a country where the notions of identity and nationhood were questioned following the toppling of a decade’s long dictatorship, the admittance to the European Economic Community (later to become the European Union) in 1987 restored a kind of national nostalgia and the celebration of Portuguese-ness that reverberated in the 1990s. This happened in many fields and guises, in the historiography of architecture it is worth to mention that the edition of the Portuguese translation of Kubler’s Portuguese Plain Architecture was only published in the late 1980s (Kubler 1988). The idea of a plain architecture as a hybrid between vernacular and erudite models, which fitted in the category of austere, simple, and, to some extent, proto-modernist ways of building merged with the practices of the architects connected to the Porto School in general, and the work of Álvaro Siza in particular, became tacitly implicit in the discourse that reverberates up until the present day.8
In 1991, Paulo Varela Gomes was one of the curators of the exhibition Points de Repère, Architectures du Portugal, that was part of the Portuguese representation of Europalia arts festival in Brussels. Portugal had been admitted to the European Union a few years before, in 1986, and this exhibition was part of an array of events and exhibitions that were planned to represent the country to other European nations. Varela Gomes recovered Kubler’s thesis about Portuguese architecture, defining the specific characteristics in which the country’s architecture had been built throughout the pre-modern era to modernity: “Sobriety, poverty even, buildings based on the concept of solidity, including derivations of traditional models,” as well as “a connection between erudite and vernacular architecture” (Varela Gomes 1991, 21).9
The recovery of the idea that there was a “Portuguese” architecture, and that it was possible to fit works that used the language of traditional forms with modernist tropes as examples of a contemporary iteration of a type of architecture that survived through time, can be also read as a reaction to the anxiety caused by the international union with other European nations. This reverberated in the last decades, when the discourse of architecture in Portugal became filled with abstract descriptions of a possible Portuguese spatial form.
Initially, Kubler derived the term plain architecture from the historian Júlio de Castilho’s use of 16th and 17th century’s Portuguese word chã as applied to architecture. The word chã, or chão, literally means flat but it was used to signify unornamented and simple. Castilho had characterized the notion of plain architecture as evidence of the “virtuous character” of Portuguese nobility, their taste for an architecture that was austere and simple—creating a moral aura over the concept of plain (Castilho 1954, 144).
This narrative of noble austerity that was materially manifested in the exteriors of the houses of nobility in Lisbon defined the “austere nature” of the architecture that Kubler perceived as precursor of modernism. However, if we read the whole of Castilho’s description, we see that he refers to austere façades, and that those simple exteriors were a camouflage to tiled walls, frescoes, exotic woods and imported tapestries (Castilho 1954, 144–146). The austere character of plain architecture, as defined by Kubler as the innate simplicity that predated modernism only works if we ignore this contradiction: that the narrative of sober and austere taste of the building’s exterior was camouflaging extravagant interiors.
Since the 1980s, the solidification of Álvaro Siza’s role as the ultimate representative of “Portuguese architecture” occurred simultaneously with the foreign recognition and the internationalization of his practice. Siza’s name became synonymous with the idea of a specifically Portuguese and local way of designing and producing architecture. This association emerged as he gradually became the main figure of FAUP—the Porto School of Architecture10—and the architect who was directly commissioned to design its new campus in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A few years later, Siza’s association with the character of national architecture was strengthened through the design of the Portuguese Pavilion at the Expo 98, the Lisbon World Exposition.
The path of Siza’s international recognition was not much different from other European practices of the late twentieth century which surfed the wave neo-liberal third way politics.11 Following a growing number of projects in the context of an expanding European Union in the 1990s, and beyond in the 2000s—inaugurated with the project for the Iberê Camargo Foundation Museum (1998–2006) in Porto Alegre, Brasil—Siza became one of the most well-known architects working today with a globalised production and long career that has spanned different historical moments. In the last decades, his architectural production reflects the vast changes in the historical context of Portugal, Europe and the world. Some of his projects are particularly relevant to analyse the relationship between architecture with social and financial forces. The Bouça neighborhood, in Porto, initially designed as social housing in the 1970s, was privatized in 2005; the large-scale project of the reconstruction of Chiado, in Lisbon, ongoing since the late 1980s, transformed that area into one of the most coveted zones by the speculative market; finally, the high-rise project 611 West 56th Street, is one of many housing towers built in Manhattan that are almost uninhabited, existing mostly as capital for investment purposes.