O Programa das Casas Económicas do Estado Novo 1933-1974: Casa e Cidade num Tempo Longo de Arquiteturas e Políticas de Habitação em Portugal

Abstract

The Affordable Houses Programme started in 1933 and lasted until the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974. The Programme's dimension and scope, as well as its distribution across the country, demonstrate the relevance of its study for the identification of a missing link in 20th century Portuguese architectural history, in three fundamental areas: the integration of the Programme in a context of profound transformation of architectural practice, particularly of housing design; the relationship between that practice and an authocratic and profoundly conservative political regime; and in the internal conflicts of the profession, both in a first period of affirmation of Modern Movement architecture in Portugal as in its ulterior critique. This research establishes two main goals. The first goal is to continue a full dimensioning of the Programme, started within the Mapping Public Housing Research Project, by gathering urban and housing projects built under the Programme. The second goal is the development of a critical review of the Programme in three scales and three scopes: that of the state - the establishment of a nation centred in the family and in the defence of private property, establish through a new comfortable and content middle class; the city - the urban morphology and clash of references between the siedlung, the garden city and the Athens Charter; and that of the house - housing design and the modern transformation of domestic space. Architectural history has frequently reduced the Programme to a limited frame of its action, focusing mainly on a formal expression seen as ruralized. A deeper analysis shows a production that was fully integrated in the development of modern architecture in Portugal, and served at times as an urban design, housing design and construction management laboratory on a national scale. The Affordable Houses Programme was, for the New State, more than an attempt to impose a formal research, as it aimed at creating a specific political view, of a corporatist inspiration, of the house as a mean for guaranteeing a stabilized and content society of homeowners.