A precedent of SAAL: the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering housing research programme in the 1960s.

Abstract

Our purpose is to reframe the SAAL programme both in the national and international context, following two main guidelines. On one hand, by observing how the team led by Nuno Portas (b.1934), taking advantage of the institutional prestige of the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (LNEC) to act independently from the dictatorial regime, would put in practice a research project on collective housing that anticipates and somehow prepares the groundwork for the strategic programs launched after the Carnation Revolution, with Nuno Portas himself as Secretary of State for Housing and Town Planning. And, on the other hand, by positioning this research within a broader architectural debate, not only taking into account several international meetings in which are presented and discussed working tools and methodologies in direct relation with the LNEC ongoing research plan, but especially the main themes that since the 1950s structured this same debate.