Dispensários: A Arquitectura da luta anti-tuberculose

Abstract

The fight against tuberculosis in Portugal mobilizes medicine, politics and architecture and it works as a tool for designing new programs and equipments, reflecting this strong relationship and commitment with the authority. These devices designed as a result of an international exchange of ideas will be the practical consequence of this triad junction. One of these equipments is the antituberculosis dispensary. At its genesis it had the intervention of Rosendo Carvalheira and Raul Lino. This study permits the mapping one of the multiple pathways of the Portuguese architecture during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The second phase of implementation of the project type to antituberculosis dispensary starts in the 30s, and follows the image consolidation of the new regime. It reflects the conflict between a more 'modern' architecture language - that marks the beginning of the transition to the 'Estado Novo' and the growing conservatism that it will be adopted and imposed in order to serve its purposes. Its Carlos Ramos who prepares the draft for the project type to antituberculosis dispensary that will be deployed in the network of public facilities of the Estado Novo. His study is a discussion of the architectural language of an object that encapsulates the journey of the work of Carlos Ramos and that, in turn, reflects the journey of a generation committed, for conviction or necessity, to the ideals of Estado Novo's regime. The fourth phase of the history of this equipment is already marked by acceptance of modern style and the modern materials and construction techniques. However, archaisms of a português suave advocated by the regime still mark their image. With the introduction of the BCG vaccine in 1965, there is a reduction of patients who occur to dispensaries, and in 1980, with the reform that comes from the creation of the National Health Service, many of the facilities are closed or integrated into new roles, and some of them demolished. Today, passed a few decades since the extinction of the function of antituberculosis dispensary, its presence in urban context is losing the meaning. Built on the environs of cities, many of these devices are now 'cylindered' by the new scale and urban life. Starts the discussion about the relevance in understanding / study these places today, to recognize its value as a social and ethnographic heritage, as an example of a time and a disease.