House as Ideology in the Affordable Houses Programme of the Estado Novo

Abstract

In April 1933 a new constitution was adopted in Portugal, establishing the Estado Novo (New State) regime, following the military dictatorship imposed in 1926. In September of the same year, a set of decrees was published, setting the foundations of the corporative state. One of those decrees determined the criteria to be adopted in the construction of Affordable Houses by the central government or with its support. That was the start of a housing programme that lasted until the end of the regime in 1974 and that was based on the single-family house. Although it was in tune with similar laws from the Primeira República (First Republic, established in 1910), the choice for the single-family house reveals a conscious choice and an ideological statement by the regime. Several representatives were sent throughout Europe, even to "communist Russia", to study housing programmes, and the small house was selected as a symbol of a Portuguese way of life, inspired in a mythical rural setting and in an obsession with a past that never existed outside of the nationalist imaginary. The house represented in that Programme an ideal family and an ideal individual; it represented, in fact, the ultimate goal of the regime: setting an apolitical community, without further aspirations and comfortable with its place in society. In the first years of the Estado Novo, the architectural design of the affordable house is charged with the ideology of the state. This paper will focus on an analysis of the first years of the Affordable Houses Programme, revealing how the House and housing design were key factors in the creation of a state image, in a State that wished to be simultaneously New and conservative.