SATH| Secção Autónoma de Teoria e História

"The last texts written by PVA, many of which remain unpublished, are specifically devoted to the survey published under the title Portuguese Popular Architecture, or had discussions on it at their outset.
Ever since PVA first mentioned the survey in Raul Lino’s catalog (1970) a thorough historical, critical, and theoretical approach to the survey was carried out by him. The presentation of the research project Portuguese Popular Architecture. A critical look, undertaken under his coordination until September 2011, is a direct and rather important outcame of this long-standing work.
This paper aims to bring in to discussion such a pervasive concern with the survey’s main questions and deep theoretical and critical implications in PVA’s writings."

The Portuguese delegation at CIAM X presented a proposal for a rural community. This was an innovative attitude that reflected the rapprochement to vernacular architecture. The same approach that is present in the survey to folk architecture, carried out in the 50s by some of the Portuguese modern architects.
This paper focuses on the characteristics of the Portuguese proposal on Drubrovnick in 1956 and what it represented in terms of national and international architectural culture.
Starting from coeval documentation – letters, drawings, reports, notes and other manuscripts – it was intend to re-read the choice of the Portuguese team in its articulation with the rural world. This choice represents an innovative contribution that combine multiple approaches, which going through anthropology culminate in the architecture.
On the one hand, it is important to deepen insight of the level of relationship of this project with the Arnaldo Araújo's CODA (Contest for Obtaining the Diploma of Architecture). On the other hand is important to explore connections with the urban interventions that were running on the countryside.

This study focuses on the work produced during the first three decades of the 20h century by four architects, who were born and lived at the two ends of Southern Europe: Greece and Portugal. They belonged to two successive generations – Raúl Raul Lino (1879-1974) and Aristotelis Zachos (1871-1939) belonged to the first generation; Carlos Ramos (1897-1969) and Dimitris Pikionis (1887-1968) belonged to the second generation – and they all shared the same ability to dialogue with modernity while remaining close to local tradition. Therefore, they allow us to rethink the role played by their projects in the architectural culture of their time beyond the habitual reading of the binomial centre/ periphery diffused by historiography.