• 1 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, “The Diaspora,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 24, no (...)
• 2 See the recent article by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Louis Kahn in Ahmedabad and Dhaka,” in Joha (...)
• 3 See for example the pioneering work of Ita Heinze-Greenberg, Erich Mendelsohn: Bauten und Projekte (...)
• 4 Testified by a recent surge in scholarship on the subject, e.g. Tom Avermaete and Johan Lagae (eds (...)
• 5 My approach here is similar to that adopted by Sarah Lynn Lopez in “The Remittance House: Architec (...)
• 6 The concept of “systems of migration,” applying to migration currents a “systems approach” initial (...)
• 7 An essential reference of this attention is the pioneering work of Dell Upton and his disciples. S (...)

1The significance of intercontinental systems of migration in contemporary architectural culture, long a subject of study, continues to require our attention. Beyond the more widely discussed role of metropolitan architects carrying the seeds of novelty between different contexts, in individual and collective displacements—from the lasting focus on what Sibyl Moholy-Nagy called “the drama and farce of diaspora architecture” by interwar European émigrés to America1 to the extensive literature on the transnational architecture of prominent figures such as Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn2 and Erich Mendelsohn,3 to a more recent interest in the Cold War architectural politics that brought international experts to operate in postcolonial Africa4—there lies another, equally broad and challenging field of research: the part played by non-architect migrants in transferring ideas and practices between sites often removed from the main centres of architectural production and dissemination, through phenomena most commonly framed by social history studies.5 Historically identifiable systems of migration are one such phenomenon.6 Establishing recognisable patterns of mass population displacement between specific geographical areas over time, these systems bring together global and local dimensions of cultural production and, in some instances, test our received knowledge of how the built environment is formed and modified. And while the correspondence between migration flows and contingents and changes in the built environment in North America has received the attention of architectural historians for a long time now,7 the same cannot be said of similar processes that took place in other parts of the world.

• 8 Ricardo Agarez, Regionalism, Modernism and Vernacular Tradition in the Architecture of the Algarve (...)
• 9 Portugal was one of the countries with the highest rates of emigration in Europe, ranking second o (...)
• 10 For recent examples of a new approach to the subject, see Isabel Cardoso’s doctoral dissertation o (...)

2In previous in-depth research on the building practices in peripheral Algarve (in the south of peripheral Portugal) during the first half of the twentieth century,8 I uncovered a number of signs pointing to the importance of migration for the history of this region’s built environment. Initially concerned with establishing what was built or designed in/for the Algarve, when it was built, by whom and for whom, and under what circumstances (political, cultural, social and economical, local, regional, national and international), through a systematic reading of forty years of building activity, this work now allows for many other relevant, transversal readings to be made. Noteworthy among these is the realisation that instances of mobility and migration were determinant in that production and one of its most exciting hidden themes. Migration, an essential aspect of Portugal’s social history,9 is generally associated with the northern regions of the country and rarely with the Algarve, and has been used to understand the country’s architectural history only in a fragmented and often heavily biased way. The building practices of returned emigrants in their home villages, especially visible since the 1970s, were generally met with either postmodernist condescension or sheer disgust until very recently, when more sociologically minded architectural and art historians joined efforts with sociologists and anthropologists to reposition the subject within the sphere of a “learned” architectural culture in Portugal.10

• 11 Adam Sharr, “Primitive and the Everyday: Sergison Bates, Lefebvre and the Guilt of Architectural E (...)
• 12 Stephen Cairns, “Drifting: Architecture/Migrancy,” in Stephen Cairns (ed.), Drifting: Architecture (...)

3This process of epistemological re-inscription, however, is not without its problems, particularly in the spheres of architectural practice and theory. In Portugal and elsewhere, designers and theoreticians feel attracted to migrant practices, located in the fringe of their core subjects, in much the same way as they have, for a very long time, taken interest in the primitive, the everyday, the vernacular, the self-built and other such processes and objects marginal to a canonical understanding of architecture. Divided between what Adam Sharr, in his critique of a specific British architecture practice, called a determination to “participate in the motions of architectural expertise” and a “fascination with the realm of the non-expert,” architects carry a “guilt long-held” over their own profession’s irreversible position outside of this realm.11 Necessarily excluded but persistently seduced, they often veer towards superficial and condescending appreciation, contaminating the way metropolitan “high” architectural culture perceives and portrays informal building practices. Everyday “architecture-by-migrants,” in Stephen Cairns’s sharp proposition, tends to fill “a long-standing slot within the structure of architectural theory,” serving as “the intellectual space that orchestrates otherness in order to furnish the discipline with stimulating architectural effects” that “nourish formally constituted architectural discourse in moments of creative drought.”12 In other words: migrant building practices form part of a pool of formal resources for contemporary architectural design, and by making such an instrumental use of those practices, “learned” architecture does not contribute to an effective understanding of their origin, development and dissemination.

• 13 This paper forms part of a new research project, provisionally entitled Migrant Building Practices (...)
• 14 For a clear example of these impassioned accounts, see Nuno Teotónio Pereira, “O Combate pela Arqu (...)
• 15 For recent case studies on the role of migrants as key players in the building world, the best exa (...)

4In this essay—a snippet of research-in-progress13—I will concentrate not particularly on what professionally trained architects saw in the building practices of migrants, or on what the former took from the latter in their intellectual work, but rather on uncovering the impact of migrants’ actions in transforming the built environment: not only through direct building activity but also through their influence on such a transformation as patrons for architects in everyday commissions. Canonical architectural culture and history tend to see architects first and foremost as the drivers of change in the built environment; this is especially the case with the history of modern architecture in Portugal. Mostly written by architects-turned-historians and occasionally by practising architects looking back on their own work and/or on the role of their own generation,14 whose views still influence those of younger scholars, Portuguese architectural history often struggles to avoid falling back on a celebratory recapitulation of the profession’s most notable works and names. I contend that this approach does not give us the full picture and I want to look at the part played by other agents, drawing on the example of the few writers who, also in the Portuguese context, offer less self-centred accounts.15

• 16 The region called the Algarve (from the Arabic Al-Gharb [“the West”] Al-Andalus, i.e. west of the (...)

5The Algarve is known today, if at all, for its position as a leading sun-and-sea tourism destination in Europe. Within the context of Portugal, the region’s image as a tourist trap—consolidated only over the last thirty years—was layered over a vague, fallacious and stereotyped representation of its traditional buildings that had been consolidating since the turn of the twentieth century. The simplicity of the Algarve’s pure, whitewashed volumes, in rural and urban settings, was contrasted with occasional details of surprisingly elaborate decoration: the lace-like chimney top, a favourite in the region’s characterisation, was mistakenly seen as a rare testimony to the legacy of five centuries of Moorish rule.16 It is therefore commonplace to think of the Algarve as a land of exotic (foreign) building practices, but those left behind seven hundred years ago when the last Moorish bastion fell to Christian hands rather than those of the last one hundred years. The Algarve’s exoticism has been duly tamed and commodified by latter-day architecture, both before and after the post-mass-tourism boom, and the region has been perceived as a small, self-contained, idiosyncratically picturesque corner of Europe, whose traditions are stable. While other areas of Portugal, such as Minho and more generally the north of the country, are seen as teeming with built evidence of population mobility—the much-maligned houses built by returned emigrants that have dotted the countryside with French- and Swiss-inspired motifs over the past three decades—the Algarve is understood to have reached the onset of the age of full-scale mass-tourism exploitation with its traditional building practices untouched by modern signs of international exchange.

• 18 For example: architect Carlos Ramos’s pioneering modernist hospital building in São Brás de Alport (...)
• 19 Notably one of the first modern seaside hotels in the Algarve, architects Jorge Ferreira Chaves an (...)

7Joining nationwide migration flows to Africa and America, Algarvians created a consistent, often subterraneous flux of cultural and material exchange that permeated the built environment at many levels. Migrants consistently supported not only new family-led construction through their remittances home but, also important, locally initiated public works, some of them pivotal to the establishment of modernism in the Algarve, through their fundraising and bequests.18 Their agency included direct commissioning. As newly made clients for architects, engineers and builders, they had a consistent part in the Algarve’s mid-century, pre-mass-tourism construction industry. Their commissions ranged from avant-garde hotel designs to single-family houses and apartment buildings.19 They were active at both ends of the flux: in my previous research, I found striking parallels between practices in Brazil and the Algarve in the 1870s and encountered Algarvian fishermen turned house builders in Morocco in the 1930s, civil engineers engaged in the building boom of 1950s São Paulo, and traders prospering in Venezuela and becoming developers supportive of modernism back in the Algarve in the 1960s.

• 20 See José Damião Rodrigues, “No Povoamento dos Açores,” in Maria da Graça Maia Marques (ed.), O Alg (...)
• 21 Günter Weimer, Arquitectura popular brasileira, São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2005 (Raízes), p. 78, a (...)

9Possible lines of exchange between Brazil and the Algarve can be traced far back, to times long before Le Corbusier’s tour of South America and the many other less-celebrated developments that nurtured architectural modernism in both places. That such lines emerge might be expected, given these regions’ shared background as sites of establishment for Portuguese natives, and specifically given the important role that Algarvians played in the colonisation of South America, both directly and following the Azores and Madeira insular settlements.20 Brazilian and Portuguese scholars insist on how these islands, previously uninhabited, became a sanctuary of sorts for vernacular architecture brought by colonists from the south of Portugal, whose customs would have remained untouched by the changes that occurred in their continental homeland.21

• 22 Louis-Léger Vauthier, “Des maisons d’habitation au Brésil,” Revue générale de l’architecture et de (...)
• 23 Günter Weimer, Arquitectura popular brasileira, op. cit. (note 21), p. 96–98, 100, 103.

10Nevertheless, the parallels between common urban house types in Brazil and the Algarve are worthy of note, and can be further detailed. The “letters” written by the French engineer Vauthier for the Parisian Revue de l’Architecture in 1853 contain one of the earliest published records of the layouts and façades of the most common single-storey house type erected by the Portuguese coloniser in Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro—the “ground-floor house” (casa térrea) or “door-and-window house” (casa de porta-e-janela).22 In the coastal towns of Faro and Olhão in the Algarve, many houses designed, submitted to a planning process, approved and built as recently as ninety years ago (fig. 1) perpetuate the features found in that Luso-Brazilian type, as described by Vauthier: the house with a front sitting room, alcoves and interior bedrooms along a narrow corridor, and a dining room/kitchen overlooking a vitally important backyard. Although never mentioning the Algarve or its coastal centres, the Brazilian scholar Günter Weimer has traced the “door-and-window” house type—the “most important dwelling type in Brazil” up until the turn of the twentieth century and widely adopted by the lower strata of the population “literally from north to south of Brazil”—back to Portugal, where it was called “fishermen’s house; ” it would have been introduced by “the Muslims” as a variation of the North-African Berber house, in itself a simplification of the Arab “well-house” (in which the “well” or central patio was pushed to the back and formed the backyard).23

• 24 Ibid., p. 94–107.

11My research into the building practices of the twentieth century in the Algarve, which included the systematic reading of the municipal planning records in Olhão from 1912 to 1965, adds another layer to this lineage—or another branch to this genealogy. A significant number of new buildings erected in this fishing town in the 1910s and 1920s followed precisely the same type of dwelling solution: Mr. José Tamiça’s building permit application (fig. 2), like many other in the extension areas of Olhão that grew along with the development of the canning industry in the interwar years, shows the long and narrow layout, the backyard and the modest elevation, typical of the Luso-Brazilian “door-and-window” house. The layout and other features of the Algarvian fishermen’s house (namely, that of Olhão) clearly illustrate how misleading the very notion of vernacular may be when, as is most often the case, it is associated with longstanding traditions: here, the “vernacular” practices were not spontaneous, age-old and unchanged, but a living process that evolved and eventually became formalised in local bureaucracy, when builders designed and submitted building permit applications to municipalities that followed the same principles until well into the 1930s. This simple house type, which has been considered the quintessential and widespread “Portuguese-Berber contribution” to Brazil’s folk architecture,24 may have been an ongoing “Algarvian-Berber” contribution after all: not generically Portuguese nor originating in a Berber influence exerted on present-day Portugal between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries, and later exported to Brazil, but specifically Algarvian and still taking place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the type was commonly used in new buildings on the coast of the Algarve. In short: not a crystallised dwelling form but a living, mutable reality subject to change according to the requirements and preferences of builders and users that were not immobile but, as we will see, rather mobile.

• 25 Namely in the symbolic representations of the regions of Portugal at the most important mid-centur (...)
• 26 Jacinto Palma Dias and João Brissos, O Algarve Revisitado, Lisbon: Lisboa 94; Festa do Livro, 1994
• 27 On the modernist fascination with the “vernacular” buildings of Olhão, see Ricardo Agarez, “Olhão, (...)

12An indication of this mobility may be found in the dissemination of a special feature of the everyday house in the Algarve—the roof parapet (platibanda in Portuguese), topping the street elevation and often exuberantly decorated (fig. 3)—which is also a recent process. Consistently stereotyped in metropolitan constructs as a defining feature of the traditional central Algarve house, present in every built-form representation of the region home and abroad,25 this characteristic Algarvian element has been tentatively interpreted in anthropomorphic readings as an essential “forehead” to the building’s “face,” a site for the dwellers’ expression with an important role in social performance within small communities.26 Providing the elevation with a strong geometric frame, the platibanda featured prominently as well in the perception of the “Algarve house” as a proto-modernist model of assembled whitewashed volumes, with pared-down walls and flat rooftops: it prompted modernists to praise villages such as Olhão as “Cubist” townscapes,27 exotic and inspirational clusters of what appeared to be box-like constructions–even when the parapets actually hid not flat roofs but pitched, tiled roofs (fig. 4).

• 28 For a discussion of this misapprehension and its implications, see Ricardo Agarez, “Vernacular, Co (...)
• 29 E.g. in Mariano Feio, Le Bas Alentejo et l’Algarve, Lisbon: Union Géographique Internationale, 194 (...)
• 30 Alexandre Tojal, “Arquitectura Doméstica em Faro na Segunda Metade do Século xix. Normas e Prática (...)
• 31 “Conselho Superior de Obras Públicas. Processo N.º1631,” assessment report 24 July 1945, 3–4, Câma (...)

13Yet this element was not part of an age-old, spontaneous tradition either. The introduction of the parapet in the Algarve was a more modern and bureaucratic process than twentieth-century architects assumed, or chose to believe, when they hailed the formal modernism avant la lettre in this building tradition.28 Duly recorded by ethnographers as part of a “modern” house type,29 the parapet was indeed legally enforced in Faro (the capital of the Algarve) only in 1872, as a means to guarantee efficient rainwater collection and drainage from the roofs.30 Its popularity and growing decorative exuberance, lasting through to the 1940s, led traditionalists to regret the “disappearance” of the tiled roof from the Algarvian streetscape and to deride the decorated parapet in Olhão as signalling “modern pretentiousness.”31

• 32 Renato Pinto Venâncio, “Presença portuguesa: de colonizadores a imigrantes,” in Brasil: 500 anos d (...)
• 33 Marcelo J. Borges, Chains of Gold, op. cit. (note 17), p. 116.
• 34 Günter Weimer, Arquitectura popular brasileira, op. cit. (note 21), p. 99, 287.
• 35 See Carlos Alberto Cerqueira Lemos, “Breve relato sobre as construções paulistas,” in Renée Lefèvr (...)

14Portuguese migration to independent Brazil is known to have peaked in the late-nineteenth century: within the so-called “mass-migration” stage in global history (1851–1930), annual average numbers of migrants from Portugal to Brazil doubled between 1857 and 1881,32 triggering a new episode of intense material and cultural exchange between the two places. With the Algarvian people sharing in “the mirage of Brazil” with migrants from other Portuguese regions until the 1910s,33 the parallel development of the platibanda in Brazil and in the Algarve took place. In Brazil, its familiar profile survives in northern Bahia (Fig. 5), in forms that sometimes suggest the input of other (African as well as native) traditions. In southern Porto Alegre, the parapet was reportedly introduced in the 1870s—a legal imposition that, under the same rainwater drainage excuse evoked in Faro in those same years, aimed essentially to camouflage the houses’ colonial appearance.34 A tiled roof was evidence of an old Portuguese (i.e. colonial) tradition, whereas the parapet boasted modernisation and was, in the context of a newly independent Brazil, associated with the influence of other European cultures deemed more civilised than the Portuguese. This was also apparent in São Paulo, where the influx of German and Italian migrant architects and master builders, brought in by the burgeoning coffee plantation economy, is said to account for the modernisation of the tiled roofs, perceived at the time as marks of old poverty, with new decorated parapets, also in the 1870s.35

• 36 See e.g. Paula Torres Peixoto, Palacetes de Brasileiros no Porto (1850–1930): Do Estereótipo à Rea (...)
• 37 A subject systematized as early as three decades ago in John Vlach, “The Brazilian House in Nigeri (...)

15Is it a mere coincidence that these parapets appear at the same time on both sides of the Atlantic? Did the modernisation of everyday buildings in Brazil somehow influence that in the Algarve, or vice versa, or both? Were both perhaps essentially influenced by French references, predominant in both countries at the time? Having noted the precise correspondence in time between peaks in migration flux and the introduction of new elements in the building practices of Brazilians and Algarvians, I suggest that this is not an incidental detail. The platibanda can be seen as a small-scale equivalent of the so-called “Casa de Brasileiro” that transformed North Portugal towns and countryside at the turn of the century: in this “Brazilian’s House”—an epithet used by villagers in Portugal that combined admiration and aversion in equal measure—emigrants returned from Brazil showed off their newly acquired wealth by cladding entire elevations with single-colour, high-relief glazed tiles (azulejos), resulting in striking patches of deep blue, green or yellow walls that stood out from their humble surroundings.36 In a way that is not dissimilar to that of the “Brazilian’s House” in North Portugal or of the “Brazilian House” built in Nigeria by liberated slaves from Brazil, whose impact extended for generations,37 the lavish platibanda (fig. 6) constitutes a mechanism of social distinction for the “modernised” returnees to the Algarve.

• 38 The existing, comprehensive social history studies on the Portuguese immigrants in Brazil in the l (...)
• 39 Herbert S. Klein, “The Social and Economic Integration of Portuguese Immigrants in Brazil in the L (...)

16The role of Portuguese migrants in nineteenth-century Brazil has been studied by social historians of both countries, even if much less than that of other migrant groups, such as Italian, German or Japanese, whose history is the object of consistent attention in Brazil.38 This is perhaps because, as Herbert Klein put it, “the impact of Brazil on Portugal was profound, but the impact of the 1.8 million Portuguese among the 5.6 million immigrants who arrived in post-independence Brazil was not so important;” only in commerce and industry did the Portuguese migrants—urban trader-labourers more than inland farmer-settlers—prove “disproportionally important in comparison to their numbers,” and highly significant in Brazilian society.39

• 40 The cortiços built by Portuguese tavern-owners/speculators in Rio played a strong part in the anim (...)
• 41 Manuel Teixeira, “A Habitação Popular no Século xix – Características Morfológicas, a Transmissão (...)
• 42 Ibid., p. 577–578.

17While the stereotyped North Portugal migrant is known to have monopolised food and beverage retail outlets in cities like Rio de Janeiro and quickly branched off to build speculative, low-income housing—the cortiço, precursor of the notorious favela, was to some extent created by Portuguese immigrants40—little rigorous research has been devoted to the detail of these migrant building practices and the specificities of regional de-localized customs. Scholarship in Portugal has taken interest in the subject and offered promising starting points, but these are still to be further developed. Urban historian Manuel Teixeira’s 1994 essay on the “transmission of morphological models” draws a parallel between Rio’s cortiços and their counterpart in Porto (Portugal), known as ilhas, high-density, speculative housing ensembles of sub-standard living units for low-income families and individuals, with which avaricious shop- and land-owners filled the backyards of buildings in central neighbourhoods.41 While the author notes the many points in common between the Portuguese and Brazilian examples, both socio-economic and formal, and presents a comprehensive overview of the circumstances of their creation on both sides of the Atlantic, he provides no documentary evidence related to specific, concrete cases that might illustrate his argument. To suggest that there was “probable influence” of Porto’s ilhas model on Rio’s cortiços because many owners and builders of the latter were North Portuguese immigrants and “brought with them their experience in construction and the formal model of the ilhas”42 is just a beginning; it is crucial to know who these migrant builders and owners were, where they came from, what exactly did they build (both in their homeland and in their host land), and so on—that is to say, to employ the methods of social and economic history to substantiate the architectural and urban history analysis. In other words: it is imperative to combine the research strategies of historians like Borges—who followed the lives of families migrating to Argentina in the turn of the twentieth century based on concrete, evidence-based stories—with the perceptive suggestions of urban historians such as Teixeira.

• 43 For example, Lindener Pareto Júnior’s master’s dissertation at Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanism (...)

18Here lies the challenge posed by arguments such as my own in this text: a speculation about the meanings and perambulations of the decorated parapet, from Brazil to the Algarve and/or vice versa, should be seen as only the beginning of a potential research thread, to be verified with solid, empirical observation. This will need to encompass methods and data from a range of fields beyond that of canonical architectural and urban studies, from sociology to ethnography, pushing the boundaries of my original territory towards those of a history of building practices where non-architects play an essential part. In Brazil, a new generation of scholars is pursuing inspiring work in this direction,43 and this is all the more encouraging because the success of such an endeavour will depend on the creation of transatlantic collaboration strategies where experts compare and share results, contributing to common research aims.

• 44 The Algarvian part in modern-day colonization efforts in Angola was first researched and published (...)

19Yet if the difficulties must be acknowledged, so too must the signs suggesting the pertinence of uncovering the practices of the Algarvian migrant builders in their diaspora, whose imprints persistently resurface in disparate contexts. Depictions of the town of Moçâmedes (now Namibe) in Angola, colonised by fishermen from Olhão from 1860 onwards and said to have been uniquely “Algarvianised” by its settlers,44 show the same distinctive trope of modernised building practices: simple volumes of pared-down surfaces and openings placed at regular intervals, topped by neat, classical-slant parapets hiding the roofs.

• 45 This understanding is clear, for example, in the scholarship produced by members of the Vernacular (...)

20Looking at the final third of the nineteenth century, I have suggested that the decorated parapet, one of the essential traits of the traditional Algarvian house in twentieth-century eyes, may have been the result of intercontinental exchanges between the migrants’ homeland and their host lands; further research is expected to confirm that this idiosyncratic feature offers early evidence of the coincidence between instances of mass migration and built-environment modernisation in the Algarve. This would be another example to indicate that what we came to label “vernacular architecture,” and associate with a specific region or locale, is in fact most commonly de-localized, mutable and in constant flux; a premise that, while long established among those in the English-speaking world who study and write the history of such building practices,45 is still far from prevalent in the architectural culture of other contexts. What came to be considered as part of a well-established regional building tradition in the Algarve, of its own vernacular custom, is in fact part of a wide circuit of transnational exchanges in which non-architects were the vital conduits.

• 46 See José Vitorino, “A Complexidade do Fenómeno Emigratório no País e no Algarve’, in 2º Congresso (...)
• 47 See João Pereira Neto, “América Latina e Europa: Dois Sentidos, Duas Épocas da Emigração Algarvia, (...)

22In the post-war period, modern architecture, combining internal and external influences, proved remarkably popular in the Algarve. Concurrently, the late 1940s witnessed the re-emergence of strong migration currents from the Algarve to Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela, coinciding with peaks of economic hardship in South Portugal.46 This was the second moment of intense contact between the Algarvians and South America in postcolonial times, before the main thrust of migration shifted back to central Europe in the mid-1960s.47 These two developments—the consolidation of architectural modernism in the Algarve and the surge in emigration from the region, along with the subsequent return of individuals in the following decades—were directly linked. The clearly modernist stance of 1950s and 1960s architecture in the Algarve was defined not only by the mind-frame and education of architects but also—and importantly—by the “architectural culture” of other players. Civil engineers, builders and clients who moved between different geographical and cultural spheres played a key part in the process.

• 48 For a discussion of this appropriation process, see Ricardo Agarez, “Metropolitan Narratives on Pe (...)

23The role of architects was nonetheless important, and their part in linking Brazilian and Algarvian design practices is the easiest to identify. Possibly the most prolific architect in the Algarve in the mid-twentieth century was Manuel Gomes da Costa (b. 1921), who, between 1950 and 2002, designed over four hundred buildings in his Faro office. With the help of skilled engineers and craftsmen he built entire blocks, squares and street fronts in the city, creating a compendium of post-war modernism whose true extent has been somewhat belittled by latter-day scholarship: by a-critically appropriating the 1950s narrative of Costa’s early steps as rare modernist conquests in the difficult battlefield of provincial, conservative Portugal, contemporary writers perpetuate the portrait of modernism as resistant and exceptional, rather than as accommodating and widely popular, as proved to be the case in the Algarve.48

• 49 The exhibition of the architect’s work curated by Gonçalo Vargas, “Manuel Gomes da Costa: Moderno (...)

24Costa established his reputation locally as a committed modernist with a series of early works that were instances of a circumstantial, technologically pragmatic and formally hybrid version of modern architecture that combined elements typical of the modernist lexicon with a very personal take on the value of (highly contrasted) colours and surfaces, for example, clearly attuned to a penchant for conspicuous compositions that had long been characteristic of Algarvian building practices, the exuberant platibanda being a good example of this local inclination. His favoured motifs—the concrete louvres or the uninterrupted boundary line framing the elevation (fig. 7)—were soon propagated well beyond the sphere of educated architects through the work of engineers and house-builders in everyday construction as post-war modernism, no longer the preserve of avant-garde designers, gained popular currency (fig. 8). While Costa’s buildings testify to his participation in this process as a particularly gifted translator, with a string of public and private commissions in the towns of Vila Real de Santo António, Tavira, Olhão and Faro, I believe the references that those he worked for also need to be considered. Remarkable as they are, Costa’s composition skills, his almost pictorial sensibility, his attention to construction detail and determination to employ innovative materials do not fully account for the breadth of modern architecture’s popularity in post-war Faro. The city’s “modernist renaissance” in the 1950s and 1960s is all the more striking if one considers the conservative slant of many designs realised there in the 1940s (fig. 9)—a status quo against which Costa would have singlehandedly fought in his participation in the “battle of modern architecture;” according to conventional accounts of his work.49 It seems to be worth asking, therefore, who the architect’s clients were, and what might have been their architectural experience, if we wish to have a more complete picture of the conditions in which such a shift took place.

• 50 Manuel Gomes da Costa, project statement 1 April 1954, 104/1954 (Rua Manuel Ascensão), Faro (Portu (...)

25In 1954, Costa designed a pair of patio houses in a secondary street in Faro for civil engineer João dos Santos Baleizão. “The use of a full-width balcony, sun-breaks and ceramic grids,” Costa wrote, “and the azulejo panel on the ground floor (following eighteenth-century examples but with a renewed expression according to our age), will contribute … to a building whose plastic stance expresses our time.”50 The architect claimed to conciliate tradition and modernity, employing the more abstract qualities of regional features and their material essence. Engineer Baleizão, who had co-signed Costa’s very first projects in 1950—among which was the architect’s first-ever building to be shown at an exhibition of architecture, the Baptista-Dores house (finished in 1951)—had by then emigrated to São Paulo, Brazil.

• 51 The influence of Brazilian post-war modernism on Portuguese architecture—through vehicles such as (...)
• 52 Cf. Manuel Gomes da Costa (22 May 2008), Interview with Manuel Gomes da Costa/Interviewer: Ricardo (...)
• 53 Niemeyer’s church in Pampulha (1942), for instance, has been seen as the source for Costa’s chapel (...)

26Costa followed Brazilian architecture mainly through media. Echoes of the Brazilian modernist phenomenon in Portugal, commonly sought by scholars in the work of better-known Lisbon and Porto architects,51 reached peripheral Faro soon enough: Costa was an avid reader of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, for example, in whose pages he could see Le Corbusier’s “heavier” modernism morph into something “lighter, airier,” in Brazil.52 Costa’s own use of sun-control devices, slanted structures, elaborate filter spaces and azulejo ran in parallel with the large-scale, widely published works of Brazilian post-war modernism.53

• 54 “São Paulo: South America’s Chicago Works Hard, Builds Fast,” Life, 26 April 1948.
• 55 Ibid.
• 56 Engineer Baleizão was one of the promoters of Portugal Democrático, a monthly newspaper founded in (...)

27Baleizão, in turn, was among the contingent of at least 165,000 Portuguese working in São Paulo, the second-largest migrant community in “South America’s Chicago” in 1948.54 I found no record of what the engineer’s expectations were when he commissioned Costa’s neatly modernist proposal, or whether he had any say in its design—although the importance of their previous collaborations suggests that he would have been following closely his own commission to the architect. Yet I am tempted to speculate further on what it meant to be commissioning buildings in Faro while living and working in the Brazilian construction industry, at a time when three-and-a-half new buildings were finished every working hour in São Paulo,55 mostly of proudly modernist design. Baleizão’s experience in South America must have furthered his understanding of architectural modernism through his active part in a fully fledged, large-scale industry, and strengthened his professional capabilities. His involvement in political activism, on the other hand, as part of a group of cultivated Portuguese emigrants seeking to denounce their homeland’s dictatorship regime before Brazilian audiences,56 possibly nurtured a progressive mind frame of which modern architectural culture—associated, as it was, with democracy—was a “natural” element. Baleizão’s displacement and overseas activities are likely to have made him a “better” client—more open and committed—for Costa’s Algarvian modernism.

• 57 Cf. Manuel Gomes da Costa (22 May 2008), Interview with Manuel Gomes da Costa/Interviewer: Ricardo (...)

28The role of other clients of Costa’s in facilitating the architect’s modernist drive is better documented, and reinforces my point. Alfredo Gago Rosa was a former emigrant to Venezuela who, having returned to Faro determined to invest in real estate, looked for someone who could design an apartment block that was “different” from what was still current in Faro—i.e. comprehensively modernist. Through one of Costa’s house-builder clients, Gago Rosa commissioned the young architect in 1955.57 This work became Costa’s best calling card: a low-rise block suspended on visible pilotis and set in a de-materialised cocoon of loggias, sun-breaks and ceramic grids (fig. 10). Costa employed different planes, surfaces, textures, degrees of transparency, materials and colours in his quest for a “lighter architecture,” as he often called it, denouncing more tectonic interpretations of regional built identity. This blatantly tropical modernist image, not a common sight in provincial Portugal in 1955, was made possible through the combined effect of Costa’s skills and Gago Rosa’s determination to mark a difference with his building, inspired by what he experienced in his years in Venezuela.

• 58 Gio Ponti, “Coraggio del Venezuela,” Domus, no. 295, 1954.
• 59 This development, which deeply impressed foreign observers, was portrayed at the time in human geo (...)
• 60 May Lumsden, “Caracas—The Buildingest City in South America,” Architectural Forum, vol. 101, no. 5 (...)
• 61 A project best known for Alexander Calder’s iconic aula magna ceiling. See e.g. Enrique Larrañaga, (...)
• 62 Between 1910 and 1959, 70.5% of the total emigration from Algarve went to South America; cf. João (...)
• 63 Algarvian workers headed for Venezuela amounted to 19% of all departures in the 1950s; cf. Marcelo (...)
• 64 Two of the priorities of Algarvian emigrants to Venezuela on their return were land acquisition an (...)
• 65 António Pinheiro Brandão and José Brandão Pinheiro trusted Gomes da Costa with twelve commissions (...)
• 66 Commissioned by Mr. José Brandão Pinheiro, 957/1959 (House in Ilha de Faro), Faro (Portugal), Câma (...)
• 67 Commissioned by Mr. António Pinheiro Brandão, Faro (Portugal), 162/1959 (Rua de Berlim 15), by Ms. (...)
• 68 The buildings on both sides of the top end of Avenida Cinco de Outubro, 1098/1957 and 700/1965, Fa (...)
• 69 Manuel Gomes da Costa, project statement 12 January 1959, 162/1959 (Rua de Berlim 15), Faro (Portu (...)

29Less widely trumpeted than Brazil, “Courageous” Venezuela—in Gio Ponti’s words of admiration58—was also undergoing an overwhelming modernisation, fuelled by revenues from the oil extraction boom that had been transforming the country since the 1920s.59 In the early 1950s, Latin America’s largest urban renewal and public housing projects were in full swing in Caracas.60 These included the Simón Bolívar centre (1942–1954), the Banco Obrero mass-housing schemes (1954–1955) and architect Villanueva’s university campus (1943–1960).61 Meanwhile, Algarvian migration to South America remained consistently strong throughout the first half of the century,62 but its targets changed in the 1950s, when previously dominant flows to Argentina and Brazil diverged to new destinations such as Venezuela.63 Many of these immigrants were employed in construction work, and as in other times in history they carried back home the references of modernity that surrounded them in the diaspora, invoking them when the moment came to invest in building initiatives.64 Another former emigrant to Venezuela, Pinheiro Brandão—whose family became one of Faro’s leading developers and Costa’s best clients65—also commissioned important works from the architect upon his return: these included the family’s beach house (fig. 11),66 prestigious residences in the new high-end neighbourhood of Faro67 and two of the most notable corner buildings in the city centre (fig. 12).68 In all these designs, and thanks to the patronage of his returned-emigrant client, the architect had the opportunity to fully develop his understanding of modern architecture as appropriated to his specific local context, choosing from the international lexicon those elements he deemed more pertinent—such as the brise-soleil, in a hot, Mediterranean-like climate—while always claiming to give close attention to how some of the Algarve’s traditional elements–like the composite roof, part pitched, part flat–could be given a contemporary expression.69

• 70 These where commissioned by Ms. Maria do Livramento Horta das Neves, a resident of El-Jadida (hous (...)

30The examples of the Baleizão, Gago Rosa and Brandão commissions suggest that the architect’s returned-emigrant clients consistently encouraged Costa to create buildings that echoed those they had seen being built around them, and indeed helped erect, while abroad—or, in any case, buildings that were at least “different” and more clearly modernist than what they saw in Faro. Moreover, the support Costa received from migrant patrons was not only patent in Faro: three of the twelve buildings designed by the architect for the town of Tavira were commissioned by emigrants to Morocco in the first half of the 1960s decade.70 Rather than anchored Algarvians (like Costa, who travelled little), these patrons were mobile agents transferred to sites of hastened modernisation, where they participated actively in the construction of modern architecture. Their cases show how, in parallel with the conventional modes of peer-to-peer transmission in architectural spheres, the seldom-discussed agency of migrant non-architects was instrumental in supporting the appropriation of post-war modernism in the Algarve.

• 71 A very good example of such studies is Alice Friedman’s enlightening discussion of the role of wom (...)

31In a wider sense, these examples support my critique of architectural histories and cultures that remain reliant on canonical narratives focused on the architect (often as an author–hero) and ignore other essential agents. My position here may be seen in the lineage of the few studies into the part played by patronage in modern architecture that, incorporating social and architectural histories, epitomise the relevance of looking at little-heralded actors of the built environment.71 Attributing the circulation and transformation of modernised practices to a diverse field of knowledge and expertise, I stress the importance of using the Algarve’s transatlantic social history to interrogate, and disrupt, the history of its built environment.