Modern Architecture

The appreciation of more recent architectural memory is often overlooked, particularly the works usually associated with the so-called “Modern Movement”, which correspond to an abundant period of production that, throughout almost the entire 20th century, gradually marked the shapes of the territory, indifferently going beyond the most specific contexts. The architecture of the “Modern Movement”, however, will forever be associated with the production that emerged at the dawn of the 20th century and which sought ways out of the stylized gaps opened up by engineering, new materials and the new programs dictated by the Industrial Revolution.

All over the world, these signs of explicit affirmation showed such obsessive commitment that they forgot the lasting marks they themselves were building, forgetting their own historical significance. The history of modern Portuguese architecture was also shaken, with its expression more evident after the Great War. Full of natural voids and contradictions, it can be said that in the post-war decades it asserted itself as a dogma in the creative process of transforming space and the design of urban form. Modern architecture is and must be categorically based on the solid achievements of science, technology and engineering.

After the exalted years of the Estado Novo, the priority of promoting industrial infrastructures overlapped, with advances and setbacks, which allowed so many facilities to be built, offering work to many architects and inevitably creating expectations around the architectural languages they produced.

Those were the years of developmentalist enthusiasm based on the naive belief that in our century there would be more discovery, speed of transformation and progress in wisdom.

How modern architecture emerged

After the euphoria of the international modern architecture of the 50s and 60s, new, more individualized proposals emerged, which took hold mainly during the 70s and 80s. Post-Modernism in architecture is linked to the crisis of modernity, in other words, the crisis of Functionalism. Architects began to take a fresh look at history and the site, often returning to projects sketched out by the modernist architecture of the early 20th century. The contemporary panorama presents a huge diversity of proposals, which seem to have already surpassed even the contestatory phase of Post-Modernism. In some cases, it is technology that asserts itself as an aesthetic, in others it is the geometry of plans and space that imposes itself.

For various reasons, 20th century Portuguese architecture is largely unprotected, and it’s serious that much of this heritage is now more subject to the pressures of real estate speculation and runs the serious risk of disappearing or being brutally de-characterized.