Porto, 1900-1950: cidade, habitação, arquiteturas intermediárias

Abstract

Today, a large portion of the world's population lives in cities, a reality that is expected to grow in the following decades. In this context, most experts suggest the need for densification to ensure cities' sustainability, although they do not clarify what such densification would look like in formal terms. After all, despite the apparent economic and ecological advantages of denser urban environments, many people still prefer to live in low-density housing. Believing that historical knowledge can help promote better architectural practices, this research aimed to identify examples of successful densification operations that balanced the need for densification with inhabitants' ambitions without interfering with the structural principle of the urban settlements they are altering. Thus, the present research was dedicated to studying middle-housing architecture in Porto during the first half of the 20th century. By middle-housing architecture, one means housing constructions that combine the advantages of single-family and multifamily housing buildings in a process that blends urban morphology themes with those of single-building design. In Oporto's case, middle housing was crucial in enabling and normalizing multifamily buildings at the beginning of the XX century. They explored income- generating architectural forms that increased the number of people within dwelling units without abrupt breaks with the prevailing dwelling concepts of the time. This process's success can be measured today by the dificulty of distinguishing these housing solutions from the rest of the city's single-family residential fabric. This successful process was achieved by maintaining the known construction unit, the narrow contiguous plot where tall multi-story single-family housing was built, while transforming it to densify the construction area and/or enhance the architectural/volumetric expression of a single-unit building through the unification of plots, containing a variable number of dwellings/floors - generating middle housing architectures. Although several academic works are dedicated to studying the city's architecture and urban built environment during this period, none address the topic of middle-housing. These studies mainly focus on monographical studies devoted to individual architects, specific stylistic movements, or exceptional initiatives (such as those undertaken by the state or those that produced large multifamily buildings). On the contrary, the present thesis adopted a typological-based analysis methodology, aiming to illustrate different strategies for forming Porto's middle- housing. These strategies varied from the horizontal aggregation of independent single-family units to their vertical stacking, including the preservation and emphasis of specific features associated with single-family housing, such as direct access to the street. A survey informed this research of concrete examples of standard housing projects built from scratch and initiated privately, sourced from the municipal licensing records of the time. These examples were selected to outline the diversity of solutions available. The goal was not only to document a group of buildings that remain largely unknown despite being widely present in the city but also to expose and systematize a range of design solutions believed to be valuable for guiding future interventions