A disseminação do modelo da casa quadripartida na cidade industrial. O caso do Porto no primeiro terço do século XX

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the analysis of the quadruple house as an affordable housing model for the industrial city. Its genesis is directly linked to a new set of demands instigated by the Industrial Revolution. The changes in the social organization and in the economic and labour dynamics since the second half of the 18th century had great effects in the cities through the creation of new urban centers and above all by its unprecedented growth. The housing crisis which resulted can be summed up by a high and fast demand and the consequent deterioration of living conditions affecting most of the working class. Given the signs of threat by the city's environment to the public health, the reform movement of the 19th century was based mainly on the rise of hygienism which addressed important transformations to the housing architecture and to the urban management, marking the normalization of decent housing as well as setting a precedent for issues to be further developed by modernism. Under the reform, the quadruple house model was inserted in the ideological wing promoting individual and detached housing and its systematization in the city of Mulhouse, France, was the subject of a wide dissemination. Inseparable to the industrial logic, the reproducibility of the carré mulhousien as an economic and healthy housing solution for the working class was a phenomenon to be observed in very different geographies, including the city of Porto. Since the model's importation in 1899, in a specific urban context, other cases of its application were to follow during the first third of the twentieth century, only to confirm the existence of certain special features that enrich the scrutiny of the architectural model's use, likewise an underlying regulatory nature to the relationship between the investor and the inhabitant. By using the quadruple housing design, Frank Lloyd Wright shows an application of that model outside the scope of the worker's dwelling, proposing it as a modernist housing solution, more precisely during the 1930's and early 1940's. Thus, invented in an experimental context and based essentially on a simple geometric formula, this housing model evolved and adapted in multiple levels (spatial, technical, urban, ideological, etc.), on an international scale and for nearly one and a half centuries.