How the magazine ARQUITECTURA (in)formed the discipline of architecture and its discourses in twentieth century Portugal

Castelo Ferreira, Pedro Miguel (2025) How the magazine ARQUITECTURA (in)formed the discipline of architecture and its discourses in twentieth century Portugal. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis results from extensive fieldwork and a survey of all architectural periodicals produced in Portugal throughout the twentieth century. As I will argue, these periodicals helped forge the discipline of architecture and its cultural discourses as we understand them today. My research spans from 1900 until 1988, marking the end of the fiftieh edition of the magazine ARQUITECTURA. The rationale behind focusing on this period is to cover the inception of architectural periodicals in Portugal and the full lifespan of the longest-lived architecture magazine in the country during that time. The study concludes with the magazine’s final editions, released during a period that saw the Portuguese revolution radically transform the country and the nature of the publication. This research aims to offer an overview of potential methodologies for studying architecture magazines and provide a historical analysis and critique of these magazines’ contribution to the field of architecture. By considering magazines as a privileged sphere of enquiry, the thesis will question the agents at play on the printed page that shape architectural thinking and the built environment. Moreover, by acknowledging the power of magazines to rewrite history, the thesis will examine how various, and sometimes well-established architectural ideas were created, matured, and propagated by a network of architectural periodicals. The thesis structure will provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of the processes through which architecture’s cultural agency is created and defined by architecture magazines. My original contribution to knowledge is to provide a continuous account of the transformations and nuances of architectural periodical publications in Portugal during the twentieth century. This work follows the most in-depth study on the subject of Portuguese periodicals to date, by the late Henrieta Dá Mesquita on A CONSTRUÇÃO MODERNA, building upon the historiography of Hélène Janiérre and France Vanlaethen, and the research group ‘Print and the Built’ from the University of Oslo. I will employ a methodological approach similar to studies such as Steve Parnell’s “Architectural Design, 1954-1972: The architectural magazine’s contribution to the writing of architectural history”, presented at the University of Sheffield in 2011, and Erdem Erten’s “Shaping The Second Half Century, The Architectural Review 1947-1971”, presented at MIT in 2004. The aim of this research is twofold: firstly, to study the emergence of a new approach to creating and discussing architecture in Portugal from the early 1900s to the late 1980s, and secondly, to examine the different editorial strategies that promoted these shifts in Portuguese architecture. As I will attempt to demonstrate, there was a direct link between the type of architecture proposed in these publications and the nature of the publications themselves, in terms of their institutional links, production format, and, more importantly, their approach to editorial content. This thesis will seek to illuminate two questions: What were the cultural and social conditions in Portugal that led to the emergence of these architectural publications? To what extent did these publications, most notably the magazine ARQUITECTURA, influence the urban and architectural development of Portugal?

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