The codification of vernacular in everyday building

Pre-modernist expansion of a small town

In the early 1910s, Olhão’s urban fabric was limited by the marshes and salt fields bordering its riverfront to the south, east and west, and the Algarve railroad to the northwest (fig.

123). Beyond the railroad (A) lay a cemetery, orchards and vegetable gardens (hortas), and dispersed cottages concentrated along three main roads – to Estoi (B) and Moncarapacho (C), and the Faro-Vila Real de Santo António national road (D), parallel to the railroad. Between these two lines, the extension of the town’s only boulevard, Avenida da República (E), was developed from 1912 on³ with residential buildings for the local upper strata (fig. 124).

Other expansion areas, in the fringes of the centre, were best suited for more modest dwellings: to the east the recently-built Rua Nova do Levante (F); to the northeast Horta da Cavalinha (G); to the northwest Cerca do Júdice, beyond the railroad (H), and Cerca de Ferro, between the centre and the tracks (I); to the west the market area (Campo da Feira) and the so-called Bairro do Mundo-Novo⁴ (J). In these areas, plots were small, narrow and long, with one

3 José Joaquim Lopes, “Projecto... da Avenida da República na vila de Olhão,” 1912.07.19 (Olhão-CMO/SOPM).

4 The “New-World” neighbourhood, where emigrants to North America built their houses upon returning to the motherland, in the early twentieth century, cf. António Simões Júnior, Antiga Crónica de Olhão (Olhão: Gráfica Algarve, 1996 [1956]), 29.

short side on the main street and sometimes the opposite side accessible from a secondary street or passageway.

Small, single-family houses were built in such plots to a recurring one-storey base-type – that of Lázaro da Costa’s house in Rua do Cruz⁵ (fig. 125), from 1916. In its layout, a long corridor, often starting in the “outer room” (casa de fora), led to a dining and cooking area, open to a minute backyard with a well, and served a battery of interior rooms. In the street façade, generous openings made the best of the light and ventilation possibilities; the parapet (platibanda) allowed full and safe use of the roof terrace – the traditional açoteia – while giving the whole façade a more urban, dignified proportion, and enough room for classical decorative motifs such as pilasters, cornices, balustrades and tables (figs. 126-128). My research found numerous planning applications of the 1910s for this very simple type of building.⁶

The twin house was a popular variation of the base-type in wider plots. José Leal’s building in Rua Almirante Reis from 1916⁷ (figs. 129-131) shows the backyard – the functional core of traditional Olhão houses – translated into formal design: it maintained its function as an outdoor living area and circulation for the dining room, pantry, kitchen, bathroom and water-closet. These compartments were not added in response to need over time, as in spontaneous architecture: they were designed and built replicating this “natural” addition process but crystallising it in a single moment, in a planning application.

A similar process can be observed in the twin maisonettes of Rua Nova do Levante, approved in August 1916⁸ (figs. 132-133), in which the absence of a backyard is compensated in the use of the two roof terraces, front and back. Here, the vernacular practice of extending confined dwellings with the addition of new volumes on the rooftop, source of the iconic “Cubist” profile, is emulated in design.

The spontaneous, “natural” pyramidal growth rationale, used to illustrate the uniqueness of Olhão’s townscape, seems to have been largely integrated with formal building practice, undermining a clear distinction between “vernacular” and designed construction. The extension to a small house in Rua António José de Almeida, in August 1920⁹ (fig. 134), enlarged an existing pangaio (the turret covering a stair to the açoteia) and added the traditional mirante on top (the observatory platform) and corresponding stair. This case illustrates, in a formal design, Fernandes Lopes’s descriptions of the informal, step-by-step vertical additions to the Olhão house over the years, responding to need and tradition.¹⁰ It epitomises the formalisation of a popular, informal building practice that was being recorded, possibly following requirement to deposit plans in the

5 Anon., “Alçada do trabalho… da Rua do Cruz,” approved 1916.11.09 (Olhão-CMO/SOPM).

6 The type represented the majority of the 95 planning submissions found in the Olhão municipal archive for 1916-1917.

7 Anon., “Projecto… na Rua Almirante Reis,” approved 1916.05.18 (Olhão-CMO/SOPM).

8 Anon., “Projecto… na Rua Nova do Levante,” approved 1916.08.04 (Olhão-CMO/SOPM).

9 Anon., “Projecto… na Rua A. José de Almeida,” approved 1920.08.20 (Olhão-CMO/SOPM).

10 Cf. Lopes (1948).

municipal planning office.¹¹ This was a widespread process (another example, fig. 135) that prolonged earlier spontaneous customs into modern modes of construction.

Lastly, another variation of the base-type suited average-width plots with no back access, as those in Cerca do Júdice. In two adjacent houses in Rua Sacadura Cabral (figs. 136-139), from 1917,¹² the designers/builders used that extra width to externalise the corridor that runs the full length of the base layout, allowing for wider rooms and making the backyard directly accessible from the main street, albeit imperceptibly so. The elemental drawing for the corner house (fig. 138) is evidence of how blurred was the line separating formal and informal building, and how rudimentary these early records could be.

Base-type and variations were sometimes assembled in larger structures, such as the remarkable eight-house complex in Horta da Cavalinha, approved in 1917¹³ and now lost (fig. 140), exemplary of a pre-modernist working-class housing scheme. It was based on local construction customs (the elevations and flat roofs were the same found in the centre, as were the interior rooms or the private backyards and wells); yet it outdid the informality and spontaneity of its predecessors and clearly belonged to the sphere of formal building trade with commercial purposes.

These hybrid buildings – created through formal design and planning processes but remarkably close to spontaneous constructions – confounded visitors to Olhão. The base structure and variants I have described were recorded by the Italian geographer Gaetano Ferro and presented as the most common dwelling types in coastal Algarve (Chapter 1, fig. 17), believed to be descended from the vernacular fishermen’s huts that, in Olhão, predated more lasting buildings.¹⁴ Others traced them back to the Berber Taddart house – whose backyard, in Portugal, did not evolve into the inner patio as it did in Spain: it became a smaller, vegetable-growing quintal.¹⁵ Whatever the explanation provided, most accounts imply that their objects of study are spontaneous, non-designed constructions, and made no distinction between these and formally-produced constructions, including everything in the broad category of “vernacular.” In Ferro’s case, two possible interpretations arise: one, that his findings refer to strictly vernacular (spontaneous) buildings, and therefore there was a seamless continuity between those and the early-twentieth-century examples of design in Olhão; two, that he was in fact recording very recent, formally-created objects, and mistaking them for “vernacular” buildings.

Similarly, for the Algarve team of the 1955-1961 survey of folk architecture in Portugal the distinction did not seem relevant, or to deserve attention. The set of terraced houses found in Fuseta and enthusiastically depicted in Arquitectura Popular (Chapter 2, fig. 113) is very similar to the housing scheme designed for Horta da Cavalinha in 1917, and its layouts are replicated in most of

11 Although I could find no record of a code of building regulations specific for Olhão until 1944.

12 Anon., “Projecto… na Cerca do Júdice,” approved 1917.05.21, and Anon., “Planta e alçado… na Cerca de Júdice,” 1917.12.10 (Olhão-CMO/SOPM).

13 Anon., “Alçados e planta… na Horta da Cavalinha,” approved 1917.04.02 (Olhão-CMO/SOPM).

14 Cf. Ferro (1956), 114-15.

15 Cf. Dias and Brissos (1994).

the examples I showed above. For the 1950s architects, these were fascinating structures that demonstrated how modern vernacular architecture really was, all repetition and rationality – which was hardly surprising if, as it seems, they were in fact looking at the product not of spontaneous activity but of construction entrepreneurship.

Another example of continuity between what was represented as “vernacular” and what was actually “designed” was the building typified in Mariano Feio’s 1949 guidebook as the “modern house”¹⁶ (Chapter 1, fig. 16). Found across Algarve with its central door, symmetrical openings, integrated warehouse or retail space, and decorated parapet (Chapter 1, fig. 5; Chapter 2, fig. 110), it was repeatedly built, to approved designs, in Olhão. In a twin set of houses and stores submitted in 1920¹⁷ for Rua 18 de Junho (figs. 141-142), the residential-commercial-storage brief – a sign of the multifarious activities of the people – was given a compact and uniform solution, undifferentiated in elevation.

These flexible building types – not specifically rural or urban – reflected the geo-economical mobility of the people (“landowner seamen,” as Fernandes Lopes called Olhão folk¹⁸) and remained current until as late as the 1920s. Instances of their formal modernisation in the 1940s (keeping varied purposes, such as processing and storing fruits or fish in a town residence) can be found not only in Olhão but also in Faro, Loulé and Tavira. The persistence of the same functional needs in time was one way by which vernacular traditions imposed themselves on formal architecture: pragmatic imperatives drove everyday building, regardless of external composition and its modulation over time.

This was also clear where construction technique was concerned. Manuel dos Santos’s house in Rua do Comércio, approved in January 1920,¹⁹ had a traditional structure (fig. 143): load-bearing masonry external walls, wood partitions and the ground-floor brick vaults supporting the first-floor pavement. The açoteia used a specifically Algarvian technique, with terracotta dalles applied in consecutive, crossed layers over closely placed timber joists – the so-called “dormentes”

system.

A decade later, when the new reinforced-concrete technique slowly replaced the traditional ways of building roof terrace slabs (the barrel or cloister vault and the “dormentes” system), this still did not amount to introducing a complete, three-dimensional concrete skeleton (of pillars, beams and slabs): the cost and the technical skills required for its calculation and execution generally delayed its adoption in everyday action for at least another two decades, becoming truly common only in the late 1950s.²⁰ Instead, what we see is a hybridization of building modes, which

16 Feio (1949), 143.

17 Anon., “Planta do edifício… na Rua 18 de Junho,” approved 1920.06.29 (Olhão-CMO/SOPM).

18 [Lopes] (1949), 296.

19 Anon., “Projecto… na Rua do Comércio,” approved 1920.01.20 (Olhão-CMO/SOPM).

20 On the other hand, early 1940s’ project statements often mention that “mix construction systems”

were adopted to face increasing difficulty in acquiring materials due to the war, e.g. in the building on Rua do Comércio 48-56, cf. Jorge de Oliveira’s project statement, 1944.03.27 (Olhão-CMO/SOPM-33804-A).

resulted in the so-called “mix structure” used across Portugal and more clearly in peripheral contexts: traditional crafts and materials were kept in the largest part (the stone foundations, the masonry bearing walls, the wood and plaster partitions, the stone balconies and frames) while concrete was employed in elements more vulnerable to physical decay (especially by water) and statically independent. The roof was one such element; keeping its planar shape – a more frequent requirement in Olhão – and improving its resistance was immediately possible with the use of a concrete slab.

Many early cases of new buildings in the 1930s presented little morphological change, and the concrete slab could only be spotted in section drawings. In 1933, a house in Rua das Lavadeiras²¹ (fig. 144) had a simple, conventional layout and façade design. Yet the thick external walls were covered with a thin concrete slab and, on it, a rooftop volume emulating the traditional mirante contained a toilet and bathroom. Also topped with a concrete slab, these prosaic signs of a growing demand for improved conveniences were easily accommodated by the old model, in enduring coexistence. In 1940s Olhão, the replacement of roof terraces built with the “dormentes”

technique while the rest of the building remained intact, became a common operation.²² The concrete slab, a reputedly modernist technique, was gradually integrated in the “vernacular” context and became virtually inextricable from it.

Between vernacular and modernism

In short, the analysis of everyday building in the early decades of the century suggests: one, the permanence of established types in both layout and external composition; two, the gradual introduction of technical innovation without significant consequences for layout and appearance;

and three, the presence of ambiguous objects that can be clearly placed neither in the sphere of strict vernacular practice nor in that of formal design. This has prompted me to reflect more widely on our understanding of the role of vernacular traditions for modernist architecture.

The theme of modernised vernacular / vernacularised modern architecture in the Mediterranean context has recently been given an important historic overhaul, by which the long-established view of modernism and popular traditions as opposites has been re-assessed.²³ From being a footnote in modern movement history and a transitory stage in the rise to high modernism,²⁴ the role of vernacular has been worked on as continuously oscillating between

21 Anon., “Planta… na Rua das Lavadeiras n.º4,” approved 1933.08.17 (Olhão, CMO/SOPM).

22 For instance, my research found eleven applications for permission to replace joist-and-dalle slabs with concrete ones in existing buildings, granted in the period between January 1943 and June 1944.

23 From pioneering texts, e.g. Pavlides (1991); Antonio Pizza, ed., J. LL. Sert y el Mediterráneo ([Barcelona]: Col.legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya, 1997); and Francesco Passanti, "The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier," The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56, no. 4 (1997), to more recent compilations, e.g. Umbach and Hüppauf, eds. (2005).

24 In the view of traditional scholars such as Nicolaus Pevsner, cf. Bernd-Rüdiger Hüppauf and Maiken Umbach, "Introduction," in Umbach and Hüppauf, eds. (2005), 13-14.

“modernism’s other and its foundation myth.”²⁵ Authors working on detailed accounts of the process generally convey the impression that the appropriation of vernacular was a voluntary and conscious action by architects, in a ground-breaking relationship between architectural design and extant building traditions that implied the discovery of the latter by the former. Furthermore, they tend to base their findings in the work of central professionals – often internationally or nationally acknowledged architects – adopting and prolonging the standpoint of the centre, and of the profession/discipline, in their analyses. Lejeune and Sabatino, for instance, aimed at defining “the transnational phenomenon of Mediterranean modernism that existed within, rather than in opposition to, modernism,” and has been downplayed by a North-based scholarship. Suggesting the existence of a shared heritage that “helped Mediterranean modernists identify with a collective ethos without necessarily forgoing national or pan-regional identities” – thus conciliating attention to local context and culture with participation in a broader trend – they claim: “By exploring the impact of the vernacular buildings of stonemasons and craftspeople on the rise and diffusion of modernism, [the essays] take a novel look at the moment when professionally trained architects began to project modern values onto anonymous building traditions that had flourished [in the]

Mediterranean basin.”²⁶

Scholarship therefore seems to perpetuate the concept of this process of projection (of modern values onto building traditions) as one whose inception can be traced in time (“the moment”) and predominantly determined by the will of learned, intellectually sophisticated, centre-based professional architects – quite a modernist concept in itself, it seems. One is lead almost to believe that an extant, rich and inspiring vernacular reality was there waiting to be discovered by educated designers and turned into solutions for their contemporary problems; that these two spheres – anonymous building traditions and professional architecture – were the two only important sides in the process, and that this would have been a one-way action of appropriation between the former, providers, and the latter, consumers.

The idea of “discovery” of a vernacular source by modernists has been present in critical and promotional writings since the time of the very first examples of this conscious process, and it is therefore not entirely surprising that such concept should prevail in present-day works.²⁷ A similar conception of this relationship as one of “finding,” almost an archaeological campaign, can

25 Barry Bergdoll, "Foreword," in Lejeune and Sabatino, eds. (2010), xviii.

26 Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino, "North versus South: Introduction," in Ibid., 6.

27 For instance, when Benedetto Gravagnuolo essays a genealogy of the architects’ interest in vernacular buildings, he consistently describes the relationship between Schinkel, Hoffman, and Le Corbusier and Mediterranean built forms in terms of “discovery,” and quotes Pagano and Daniel’s claim that North European architects had “discovered [in the Mediterranean] the emotional power of the poet/builder.”

("From Schinkel to Le Corbusier," in Ibid., 36). In the same collection, Sabatino looks at “how traditional buildings realized by anonymous masons or peasants were ‘rediscovered’ or revalued and appropriated by professionally trained architects to construct Italy’s modernist image during the 1950s” (“The Politics of Mediterraneità in Italian Modernist Architecture,” 42).

be found in most existing accounts of the way post-war modernist architects in Portugal

“discovered” the country’s vernacular heritage.²⁸

When I outlined my research project for Algarve, my hypothesis was that this process of modernist appropriation of the vernacular would have been more complex, and that a closer, more precise look would reveal further layers to it. Data from 140 planning applications of pre-modernist years (the 1910s and 1920s) in Olhão begins to show evidence of such strata and of the intricate game of influence and interference that originated them. An intermediate layer, visible in the examples above, developed between the “purely” vernacular material of anonymous, non-designed built objects that constituted the basis for inspiration by architects and their own proposals processing such inspiration. A transition stage, not confined in time but persistent throughout the entire period, resurfaced and became more apparent when architects were absent (as was the case in early-twentieth century Olhão). This was a step where the traits and modes of building tradition, common in everyday practice among contractors and clients, were codified and integrated into the bureaucracy of modern-day urban regulations, for the purposes of planning and building permissions required by urban and economic growth. Neither produced by trained architects, nor part of a metropolitan mind frame searching for antidotes to abstraction or industrialisation, this work was done largely by builders or clients themselves, or by their draftsmen. By way of this transition layer, informal construction and design habits, daily repeated over time in the modest houses of a small town, entered the realm of formal practice, in a most natural and uneventful way.

When the modernist “discovery” of vernacular forms begun to unfold and produce its more visible results, and centrally trained, official architects started to provide their sophisticated interpretations of tradition – modernist or conservative –, they worked over a ground of well-established vernacular-inspired motifs, to which they had to relate. In Olhão, the elemental volume, the sharp-edged surface, the invisible roof and the parapet, the external masonry stair, decorated to a lesser or greater extent, had already been integrated into formal design through this transition step and thus brought from building tradition to the sphere of semi-industrial construction, before architects started doing the same. The result was an increasingly complex reality where “true”

anonymous objects were mixed with others belonging to a codified design process; in their enthusiasm, modernist scholars and writers included both spontaneous and designed objects in one all-encompassing category of popular building, crystallised in the singularly picturesque “Cubism”.

Drawing from the evidence of my case study, I suggest that in small peripheral contexts like Olhão, there was an immediate precedent, a living thread between vernacular and modernism, and that the latter did not unearth the former, as if working on ancient ruins. The process of appropriation was already well under way and embedded in everyday practice. As an underlying, ongoing reality, vernacular and its filtered images were not merely an optional “modernism’s other”

– they formed a condition imposed on modernism, which modernism chose, in several instances,

– they formed a condition imposed on modernism, which modernism chose, in several instances,