Arquitectura Industrial & Arquitectura Moderna. Afinidades na prática arquitectónica portuense nos anos 50 e 60

Abstract

In the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the industrial shapes, mostly created by engineers, obtained a major role as they were spread in the architectural field. Those pure, simple shapes represented the ideals of a truly new, modern architecture, which represented progress, innovation and efficiency. Therefore, as a great impact was brought by the American industrial architecture, in which that time's greatest improvements regarding industrial production were recorded, it is in Europe that those buildings' language is disclosed and fully implemented, not only serving those simple shapes' purely pragmatic goal, but adding the symbolic layer to those works, as that language moved on to other functions. In Portugal we witness a delay in the arrival of those modern shapes, whereas it is only in the 20's that a first stage of the modernism is seen, and an ephemeral one, due to the policy of the "Estado Novo". Only in the 50's and 60's those shapes were disseminated, finding once again an exceptional field for experimentation in the industry. It was this work's main goal to understand if and how that happened also in Oporto, knowing that the city's circumstances were followed by some local dynamics, for that it is from that city that the second stage of the modernism's most prominent architects come. Using two formally different examples, it was found a wide resource, although late, to a modern architecture by two main means: by the formal design, and by its functional distribution.