2010-2013 - Ana Vaz Milheiro (IR)

 

The Colonial Urbanization Offices: Architectural Culture and Practice

Research funded by Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)

PTDC/AURAQI/104964/2008

 

 

 

This study aims to inventory, catalog and analyze the work of successive Offices that belonged to the structures of the Ministries of the Colonies and later of the Overseas (henceforth designated overseas ministries) and that were responsible for the architectural and urban initiatives of the central power in the overseas regions during the Estado Novo between 1944 and 1974.  The research project is part of a more comprehensive study about the city and architecture produced in the former colonial territories, the aim of which is to further the knowledge of the intellectual and constructed heritage generated by the  Portuguese and to make it available to the public at large by means of an on-line consultation system.  At present, the archives of the drawings and descriptive memories produced by the different project offices under the jurisdiction of the overseas ministries is scattered across various institutions such as the Historic Overseas Archive (Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino – AHU), Archive of the Portuguese Institute
to Support Development (Instituto Português de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento) and the Archives of the Ministry of Public Works and Housing.  In the first phase, the main aim is find a way to make the consultation of these projects accessible and to compile essential information (name of the project
architects and engineers, location, date, etc.).  In the second phase, the objective will be to locate and describe the current condition of the building constructed in the former colonies that resulted from the work of these project offices;  this will provide us with a real and objective panorama of its meaning and importance for the first time.  These project structures go under three names: Colonial Urbanization Office (Gabinete de Urbanização Colonial), Office for the Urbanization of the Overseas (Gabinete de Urbanização do Ultramar), and the Direction of Urbanization and Housing Services (Direcção de Serviços de Urbanização e Habitação) which belonged to the General Direction of Public Works and Communications of the MU.  Using factual data (inventorying of the projects and their description, location and buildings constructed), the aim is to understand and describe the project culture of the technicians involved in these offices (architects and engineers with various specialties).  Their technicians made projects for all the Portuguese colonies, namely in Africa, India and Asia.  Most of the architectural programs were intended for the construction of public administration buildings, hospitals or schools. There are also examples of sports buildings, religious buildings (exceptional requests) and housing for the families of civil servants.  The latter group also includes summer houses and tourist buildings. The projects for the sewerage system and water collection are equally important, with the structuring of public networks for private and collective use (e.g. through public fountains).  The existing processes are
generally made up of designed and written pieces of architecture, designed and written pieces of engineering (structures and sewerage) and, less often, estimated budgets, or more rarely, data on the development of a specific project (alterations or its non implementation).  The physical descriptions of the places that accompany the urban plans follow the statistics, the demographic data and the geographic analyses made by other official institutions linked to the overseas ministries.  The description of the contents of projects in the keeping of the AHU is already in progress by the Head Researcher. 114 projects were consulted covering Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and São Tome and Príncipe; partially Angola and Cape Verde; Timor, India and Macau are still to be done.  The academic studies already completed involve mainly Angola and Mozambique;  they do not describe the internal organization of these offices from a historic perspective either in relation to the way they were run or the management. Very little is known about their hierarchical structure, the professional training and areas of specialization of their technicians (architects and engineers), the supervision of the projects or the extent of the theoretical production.  The scope of the application of these projects in the field, i.e. their effective implementation, is equally unknown.  The technicians that belonged to the staff of these offices will also be studied.  The research aims to compile information about the private estate of these architects and engineers, related to their official functions in order to determine the level of knowledge they had for the places they made projects for e.g.  One of  the cases to be studied is that of the architect Luís Possolo, deceased, which is owned by one of the researchers.  A further objective is to record testimonials on video such as that of architect Fernando Schiappa de Campos, with a view to a “future memory”.