Sessions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Presentations: 15 - 20 minutes, depending on the number of participants in each session, with a debate at the end.

Sessions marked with (*) will be spoken, preferencially, in English.

 

Themes

 

1 | Rescuing spatial dystopia.  Large housing complexes for the middle-class 

 

Ana Vaz Milheiro | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL / CIAAM

Filipa Fiúza | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL

João Cardim | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL

Bruno Macedo Ferreira | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL

 

This theme aims to debate the role of these housing complexes within the context of the architectural and urban culture of the 20th Century. As a model it establishes a synthesis of ideas and concepts arising from the 19th Century, gathering formal, cultural, social and technical issues about the city such as hygiene and health; the garden-city; the claim of a house for everyone; the city of the future; the city and the new machines (transports and telephones); the home-work relation, the new building techniques and an overall conscience of a new historical condition. The confluence of debates, reflections and proposals resulted in modern high-rise buildings, surrounded by green areas and served by a functional layout of roads.

The analytical framework may vary from case studies to wider scopes of the phenomena in national or transnational contexts. Either by morphological, historiographical or conceptual focuses, it is intended to embrace questions such as:

 

1.1 | The concepts and forms present in these housing complexes;

1.2 | Backgrounds and contexts that led to the arising of mass-housing models;

1.3 | The way this model was used, imported, exported and adaptated in diferent places, times and cultures;

1.4 | The new neighbourhoods as a field of experience for new housing concepts and new building technical systems;

1.5 | The presence of these complexes in debates such as (de)densification and the compact city;

1.6 | The importance of the concept of megaform (Frampton, 1999) in light of these urban designs;  or, in opposition, of the one of megastructure.

 

 

 

2 | Metropolitan (re) territorialisation. Urban expansion and the large housing complexes

 

Paulo Tormenta Pinto | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL / CIAAM

José Luís Saldanha | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL / CIAAM

Bruno Macedo Ferreira | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL

 

The new modern neighbourhoods implied an articulation with the traditional city, being in a first moment understood as anchoring places enhancing a sustainable urban growth. In the subsequent decades new phenomena arose such as their absorption by the city and their integration in a wider metropolitan reality, or their renewal in face of demographic “shrinking” processes.  Eventually, on the contrary of some predictions on the urban consequences of new technologies of information, not only did cities maintained their size but also grew up, sometimes with high levels of densification.

In the wider context of metropolitan and territorial realities, these complexes challenge notions and concepts already established from a disciplinary perspective, upon which one should reflect on:

 

2.1 | The dialectic between central, polycentric or bipolar models as opposed to the sectorised city;

2.2 | The spatial organization and control (social, political and administrative) in the (des)aggregation of fragments;

2.3 | The limits and contexts of suburbia and periphery, particularly in megacities, and the articulation of these new territorial and metropolitan realities;

2.4 | The city as a process as opposed to an entity;

2.5 | The role of roadway infrastructures (and consequently of transports strategic planning) in developing large scale urban models, as well as their inherent potential and limitations;

2.6 | The way the new territorial and metropolitan realities in the turn of the 21th Century evolved from these models.

 

 

 

3 | Death and Life of large housing complexes. Appropriations, uses and identities

 

Isabel Guerra | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL

Sandra Marques Pereira | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL

Débora Félix | LLM Researcher

 

From the mid-20th century onwards, the suburban neighbourhoods had as first recipient a middle-class whose aspiration was related to a modern dwelling and to a new, forward-looking lifestyle outside the traditional city and marked by technological progress. Often described in a pejorative way due to its residential monofunctionality, anonymity and isolation of the private space – the house – in relation to the public space, these neighbourhoods originate a series of questions following these premises:

 

3.1 | What is the correspondence between the proposals of these modern housing models and the effective lifestyles of its residents?

3.2 | In what way the architectonic modernity and the cosmopolitanism interacted with formal and/or informal aspects of local identity and with broader aspects concerning new public policies and new urban identities?

3.3 | What was the impact of the physical space in the structuring of the ways of life and how the diversity of the successive occupations was reflected in the maintenance or alteration of that spaces, given their later exposure to very diverse uses and social/cultural contexts?

3.4 | In what way the construction of neighbourhoods in non-European geographical contexts, with very diverse occupations in what concerns to the ethnic, religious, social and cultural origin of its dwellers, is related to its "success" or "failure", both in social and economic terms?

3.5 | How was the coexistence between the initial cosmopolitanism of these neighbourhoods and elements of local belonging, and how phenomena of identity, indifference or anonymity emerged? 

 

 

 

4 | The housing problem in the architecture periodical press: manifest, critic and divulgation

 

Rute Figueiredo | ETH Zurich / D-ARCH/gta

Margarida Brito Alves | FCSH/IHA

Rogério Paulo Vieira de Almeida | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL / CIAAM

 

Architecture publications have played an essential role in the launching of the debate around the housing problem, as well as in the divulgation of housing models and typologies. In fact, although its general use only occurred after World War II, already in the 1930s the Grand Ensembles emerged in the specialized periodical press (L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, vol. 1, no. 6, June 1935), a theme that became recurrent in the subsequent decades. Thus, we aim to reflect on the different ways that model appeared in the periodical press. Generally, we intend to debate:

 

4.1 | To what extent the presence of these ensembles in the architecture periodicals contributed to their discussion and use?

4.2 | Which protagonists were divulgated and what was the expression of that divulgation?

4.3 | What kind of analyses and critical discussion it is possible to detect?

4.4 | What predominant discourses – of acceptance, rejection or critique – were formed from the presence of these ensembles in the architecture periodical press?​​​​​​​​​​

4.5 | To what extent these publications provide nowadays food for thought in relation to housing?

 

 

 

5 | Beyond the model. Conceptual dislocations

 

Mónica Pacheco | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL / CIAAM

Ana Vaz Milheiro | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL / CIAAM

Rogério Paulo Vieira de Almeida | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL / CIAAM

 

The housing complexes had throughout several decades a varied situation regarding production. An initial panacea for the housing problems and an answer to the dream of the emerging middle-class, they were adopted by public and private promoters. Simultaneously target of criticism and legislative prohibition (France, 1973), they were more recently considered heritage (Faut-il protéger les Grands Ensembles? Ministère de la Culture, DAPA, 2007). With the end of the Victorian era and with the redefinition of the interior space which spread throughout Europe, and also with the end of the most troubled large-scale rehousing period, the housing theme has in a way lost its initial drive. It is eventually from the large private promoters that some of the most interesting models for a middle-class with new aspirations are developed, a synthesis of almost a century of housing research. On the other hand, the fact that this class moved by car to work has also changed, in a way, the configuration of the public space and the understanding of it. While some have reinterpreted Clarence Perry’s concept of Neighbourhood Unit, others have become dormitory suburbs. Within this theme it is intended to understand:

 

5.1 | If, from a typological point of view, there is a correspondence between a certain idea of urbanity inherent to the model in the definition of the current domesticity?

5.2 | What urban, social and individual ways of life are proposed by this model and in which way they are reflected in the design of the public/collective space and of the more intimate space of the “house”?

5.3 | In what way certain contexts, when confronted with this model, have transformed it in a satellite city, in a “neighbourhood unit” or simply in a dormitory suburb? 

5.4 | Which transformations have implied the differences between the local, climactic, cultural and social contexts or even the different familiar structures in the implementation of this model?

5.5 | In what way the study and analysis of these architectonic-urbanistic models are reflected in their production?

5.6 | How the diversity of promoters (private and public) questions the impact of a “universalist” housing model, centered in a modern and westernized culture, and in the emergence of broader positions regarding the establishment and discussion of the theme of urbanism and architecture for the middle-class?

 

 

 

6 | Outside looking in. Other Visions − art, literature, cinema and music

 

Jorge Figueira | CES / DARQ, Coimbra

José Luís Saldanha | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL / CIAAM

Luís Urbano | FAUP

Alexandra Areia | DINÂMIA'CET-IUL

 

The modern suburban neighbourhoods have constituted from early on a social and iconic reality, a source of attraction to several fields of artistic production. As a problematic centre of action and/or representation or as a present scenario, the modern suburb is present in numerous means of cultural expression such as painting, film production, literature and music, revealing a multiplicity of meanings and perspectives. It is about the diversity of views that the cultural production has developed that it is intended to reflect, favouring crossed perspectives, namely:

 

6.1 | In what particular way the artistic means were used as critical vehicles?

6.2 | In what ways the arts have contributed to the construction of a certain urban imagery?

6.3 | How did the artistic milieu represent these places, contributing to the way the city is now imagined and/or remembered?

6.4 | What is the role of artistic production, which mirrors this reality, in the definition of the contemporary architectonic and urban culture?

6.5 | How the multiplicity of meanings these artistic environments overlap have contributed to the current idea of middle-class and its aspirations?