A reconstrução de Lisboa e a vigília por destino

Abstract

This thesis dissects the resurgence of Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake. The main goal is to rethink the city within a conflicting debate that is capable of rescuing it from a questionable pacification; capable of unveiling it as a needed response or attempt to resist the tremendous tragic burden caused by the Earthquake; that may be able to deepen its dreams and contradictions; enhancing it through its fragility; making it meaningful. More specifically, the work is about how Lisbon - forename of a character where one may find the gathered, overlapped, and divergent intentions of Manuel da Maia, Eugénio dos Santos, and the Marquis de Pombal - dreamed about a future freed from fear, loss, and irrationality; about how it perceived the consequences of its vision of a future identity and how it may have aimed to hold back its early purpose. This work is, therefore, about assertiveness, recognition, and regret. From this tripartite way of understanding Lisbon, the thesis will draw its structure. The first part will seek to set up Manuel da Maia's Dissertation and the plan drawn by Eugénio dos Santos within the emotional and cultural consequences of the tragedy: seen in the chronological conflict evoked by the ruins, in the context of an articulation between a rational belief and the suggestion of a subverted nature, without virtue, intent nor reason. Out of the reaction to this double-sided tragedy, the discourse unfolds in two parts, focusing on the challenging struggles between Lisbon and its emerging demons: the free contemplation of destiny and the initial terror resounding in its rationality. Through this confrontation and the way the future would be dealt with afterwards, the work will sort out the temporal problem at stake in the new Lisbon. At the intersection point between Lisbon's initial intentions and their consequences, its character will be clarified; the profound difficulty of the circumstance in which it found itself immersed will be revealed: a dispute between a new time reclaiming Lisbon to be its own expression and a past time that, despite the initial radicalism of the project for the downtown area, in the end, would prove to be not that silent.