A Contaminated Gesamtkunstwerk

Abstract

During the year of 1976 there was an unprecedented interest of the international architectural media in Portuguese architecture, which up until that year, had been seldom published abroad. The reason for this sudden interest of the architectural milieu in Portugal was the works produced under the aegis of the so-called SAAL process, an ephemeral housing programme created in the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution of 25 April 1974. Among the projects featured, the architectural media showed a special interest in the SAAL operations developed in the city of Porto, where the work of Alvaro Siza, among others, arguably epitomized a novel approach to urban renewal. What was, then, so appealing in these works? What was the aspect or the reasons that triggered this unforeseen interest in Portuguese architecture? The answer, I would argue, is relatively straightforward and entails the concatenation of three factors: revolution, grassroots movements, and participatory processes in architecture and urban design. The concurrence of these factors was, in fact, timely at a moment of widespread disciplinary and political debate. Now, what was the extent to which the Portuguese experience in the revolutionary period of 1974-1976 contributed to the on-going disciplinary debate? Was it a novel aesthetical approach? A new design methodology? Was it a new commitment of the discipline with social change? In this paper, I will argue that the fundamental aspects of that contribution were triggered by a reassessment of the power relation between architects and grassroots empowerment in planning and design processes. Through the discussion of the interplay between dissent and consensus-building in the SAAL process, I will illustrate how the architects working in Porto’s SAAL operations negotiated their position as authors/artists with grassroots movements and produced an hybrid architectural outcome that aspired at creating a synthesis of disciplinary autonomy with the vital impulses emerging from the collective and the everyday; a contaminated total work of art.