Modernismos do Sul

This project explores the possibility of a critical revision of early modernism’s prevailing definition – its stylistic focus, its formalist and anti-representative bias, as well as its autonomic assumptions; or, as far as architecture is concerned, its functionalist credo – through the hypothesis that Southern European modernisms were committed to their entrenchment in popular culture (folk art and vernacular architecture) in a way that anticipates some of the premises of what would later become known as critical regionalism (Feivre e Tzonis, Frampton).

It is our purpose to explore a research path that parallels key claims on modernism’s intertwinement with bourgeois society and mass culture (Clark, Crow), by way of questioning the idea that there is but one kind of aesthetically significant regionalism – the kind that resists colonization by international styles and is supported by critical awareness – and that it occurred in the context of postmodernist architecture.

This research project is set up on the basis of case studies drawn from Spanish (specially Catalan), Italian and Greek contexts, even though Portuguese modernism of the first three decades of the 20th century is the centerpiece for questioning the initial hypothesis.