ARQUITETURA DOMÉSTICA EM DIÁLOGO. O papel da colonização portuguesa na forma de construir e habitar o espaço doméstico contemporâneo na Guiné-Bissau

Abstract

During the last decades of Portuguese colonization in Guinea-Bissau (1930- 1974), the house has been imagined, designed, built, but then used and transformed. We use the house as a critical tool to question how colonialism operated through domestic architecture and to discuss its legacy in the contemporary context. The Ajuda Neighbourhood in Bissau was selected as a case study, for the Guinean context, because it represents one of the last neighbourhoods within the city that was promoted by the colonial administration to accommodate families from the African population and because it has maintained a peculiar social status untill these days. By the means of ethno- architectural survey, the research unveils the transformations occurred within the space as well as its re-use and new significance. Through an archive research ideas, objectives and models are unearthed to discuss the colonial discourse on a certain type of dwelling. The house was, in fact, used as a mean to discriminate certain categories of individuals, to promote privileged social status, to influence way of life based on European patterns, and to be agency of an idea of western modernity. Finally, the house is also examined to observe the appropriation and the resistance processes that are triggered by the inhabitants in order to reveal how colonial legacy is negotiated nowadays both in the space and in the spatial practices. By re-centering the theme of the house, the research contributes to the discussion on colonial domestic architecture and to the debate on the standard of a European house that fostered the idea of a 'civilised' dwelling. Key words: domestic space, apropriation, resistance, colonial legacy, way of life.