White Walls, Ideological Margins: Revolution and Identity in Italian-Lusitanian Architectural Dialogues

Abstract

This article examines the exchanges between Italy and Portugal until the 1970s, demonstrating how Italian architectural culture informed, though not entirely determined, Portuguese project culture during and after the Estado Novo. Drawing on Portuguese journals, archives and built works, it identifies distinct phases of reception: the late 1940s engagement with Casabella and E. N. Rogers; the 1950s–60s appropriation of neo-rationalist methods; and the post-1974 assimilation of Tendenza. Central to this inquiry is the figure of Távora, whose network of Italian interlocutors (Gardella, Albini, Rogers) and dissemination of their discourse through the Inquérito (IARP) furnished decisive resources for the emerging Oporto School. The article further reconstructs Siza’s early formation, mediated through Távora, Italian publications, and “Italian” readings of Aalto and Loos, tracing how his compositional principles evolved distinctly after the Revolution. Among the archival evidence examined is Silvia Viana de Lima’s 1960 translation of Rogers’ essay “L’Architettura moderna dopo la generazione dei Maestri,” that reveals the depth of Portuguese engagement with Milanese discourse. The article contends that the Oporto School, while deeply indebted to Italian neo-rationalism, synthesized these conceptual instruments with vernacular traditions, late Nordic modernism, and revolutionary imperatives. A disciplinary position shaped by specific conditions: delayed modernization under dictatorship and subsequent post-revolutionary transformation. The study challenges historiographies that assimilate the Oporto School into the narrative of modern movement continuity, arguing that no full modernism took root in Portugal under the Estado Novo. Postwar Portuguese architecture is positioned instead as a belated but consequential “realistic postmodernity”, a third way forged through transnational dialogue, in which Italian neo-rationalism played a constitutive rather than incidental role.