The truth is, given the temptation of using the interesting decorative motif that is the pineapple […] it escaped me that the fruit is not cultivated on the island of Madeira.
Raul Lino, Letter to the chairman of the Association of Fruit and Vegetable Exporters of Madeira, 1942
Raul Lino on Pineapple Island
Raul Lino carried out a number of design projects in Madeira in the 1940s. In an article entitled “A propósito da Casa Madeirense” [“On the Madeira House”]1 he recorded some of his impressions of the island. His sensitivity was offended above all by the “form and colour of the new roofs that soullessly scour the landscape. The geometric rigidity of the roofs without the traditional moulding [...] The French gutter tile can only be recommended because of its relative cheapness, but it is horrid”.2 In his characteristic style, he exclaimed: “Oh, nice Madeira houses, discreet and quiet, full of grace and calming, lovingly huddled in leafy gardens!”; before ending with a question: “The Portuguese house – discreet, restrained, decorated with creeping plants, in union with the garden (or simple yard) [...] – does it not, at all times, fulfil the ideal of the house for Funchal?”3
Which brings us to the age-old “issue of the Portuguese House”. One cannot discuss it without mentioning Raul Lino, the author of A nossa casa, published in 1918, the only best-seller to have been written by a Portuguese architect on Portuguese architecture.4 Raul Lino was a central figure in this discussion, not only because of the works he produced in the first two decades of the 20th century, but also given his whole written output on the matter. “Never ask in what style one is going to build. It is only logical that one should build in the style of the region”, he emphatically affirmed in his best-seller.
Amongst his built projects in Madeira – the restoration of the Funchal City Hall, the fountain in Largo do Colégio and the Vila Ema – one must highlight the headquarters for the Association of Fruit and Vegetable Exporters of Madeira.Lino decided to decorate the tympanum above the main entrance with a stone relief – a detail that was, indeed, very much to his taste – depicting a basket filled to the top with fruit produced in the region. In the drawing he sent to the client the fruit basket was topped by a big vigorous pineapple [a].
The association’s chairman protested: a pineapple from Madeira, Mr. Architect? Lino’s justification was: “The truth is, given the temptation of using the interesting decorative motif that is the pineapple […] it escaped me that the fruit is not cultivated on the island of Madeira”5. In his second version [b], the one that was finally carried out [c], he replaced the pineapple with a bunch of bananas…
What conclusion can be drawn from this episode? Raul Lino did nothing more than choose the motif that, in plastic terms, best served his art: his distracted hand preferred “the interesting decorative motif of the pineapple” over the vulgarity of the banana. What did it matter that pineapples were not grown in Madeira? Could anyone blame him for his choice? Lino was, after all, very attentive and accommodating with this clients and, to top it all off, a regionalist…
The “Madeira house”, according to Reis Gomes
Still today, when talk turns to the “Madeira house”, the image that comes to mind, that which seems to have crystallised in the island’s social imaginary, is the sober two-storey single-family house, with protruding eaves and moulded roof line, window spans framed in masonry and the traditional green window shutters. The colour of the whitewash may vary – from white to ochre or to dark pink. There is almost always an veranda annexed to one of the façades and, in the garden in between smooth gravel paths, there is a pergola covered in bougainvillea, or perhaps the very typical “pleasure house” where, from behind the blinds, one can discreetly observe the street [d].
But does this image really represent the typical Madeira house or is it mere fiction inspired by some of the themes of local architecture? In the early 1930s, Major Reis Gomes – a publisher, dramatist and aficionado of the Madeira house – believed the former to be true and affirmed this in a book he wrote on the subject: Casas madeirenses [Madeira Houses]6 [e]. Based on his observation of both erudite and popular models, Reis Gomes concluded that the “Madeira house” did exist and that it could be classified under the continental type of house but had certain “differences that give its own character”. In his wanderings through historic and picturesque Funchal the author summed up of the constants of the Madeira house: a thick cymatium under the eaves, windows with lintels that “are elevated to entablatures” that are frieze-like, the frequent use of balconied windows with wrought iron rails, panes of glass covered with sliding boards or shutters, a certain “verticality of the architectural connections”, the use of tuff and basalt around window and door spans and the recurrent use of solutions such as the “lookout” tower and the “pleasure house”.
Nowhere does he indicate a building, be it popular or erudite, that due to its characteristics comes close to the archetype of what the “Madeira house” could be. The author imagines it on the basis of his observation of a set of architectural themes that caught his attentive eye on his erratic walks around Funchal. The house only existed in his imagination. But there was nothing to stop that house being designed, provided there was someone to do that. That someone was Edmundo Tavares.
Edmundo Tavares, the illustrator
As an architect who belonged to the first Portuguese modern generation, Edmundo Tavares, who was born in Lisbon (1892) and trained at the Fine Arts School (1903-13), left behind a considerable body of work in Funchal, where he settled for several years in 1932.7 A contemporary of Carlos Ramos, Cassiano Branco and Cristino da Silva, his architecture reflects the aesthetic duality so characteristic of his generation – the constant hesitation between the modernist expression and the regionalist historicism that came to be known as the Português Suave [soft or suave Portuguese] style.8 Only in this perspective can one understand that one and the same designer could create works as disparate as the Lavradores Market [f], which is clearly modernist in style, and the Banco de Portugal branch in Funchal [g], with its great grooved columns, entablature and pediment without cymatium.
His devotion to the Portuguese house must be seen in the context of the hesitation of his generation: “for us Portuguese”, he wrote later, “the house that most pleases and satisfies is the house that is Portuguese in constitution and physiognomy – the nice, comfortable and welcoming house that speaks our language and is adapted to our way of being.”9 That house was not, however, seen as a static model that could not evolve or be updated. “By all means”, Reis Gomes agreed, “within the regional type an architect versed in the organic and decorative principles of this type can vary the respective construction models without limits.”10 Edmundo Tavares was of the same opinion.11
The modernisation of the “Madeira house”
In 1934 the General Autonomous Council of the District of Funchal decided to open the Avenida Oeste (now Avenida do Infante), which was already included in Ventura Terra’s plan, to create a new neighbourhood. In a footnote to the 1937 edition of “Casas Madeirenses”, Reis Gomes welcomed the rules established for new construction, which said that buildings “should have a Madeira identity, duly modernised”. Raul Lino and Edmundo Tavares were to design some of the buildings. Finally, two of the theoreticians on the “Portuguese house” were to have the opportunity to show, in practice, how the “Madeira house” should be.
Lino designed the Vila Ema [h]. With its masonry in “soft stone”, whitewashed walls, roof with protruding eaves and half-pipe roof tiles – and with the traditional “moulding”12 – and a veranda leaning onto one façade, the Vila Ema is close to the archetype of the “Portuguese house” as conceived by Lino. It was what would constitute “in any period, the ideal of a Funchal house”13. With its design based on “simple lines” and “lacking ornamentation or any superfluous extravagance”14, as Lino wrote in his descriptive notes, this house also reflects his obstinate refusal to use materials or solutions from outside the traditional “palette”.
On the neighbouring sites (numbers 50 and 52), Tavares designed two houses with viewing towers [i], in an allusion to the “lookout” tower, a theme he had indeed already visited in the illustrations he submitted to illustrate Reis Gomes’s book. But the important thing here is the practical concretisation, i.e. the risk-taking possibility of modernising the “Madeira house”. The signs of such modernisation are multiple: balconies and pergolas in reinforced concrete, decorative art déco-inspired geometrism, French gutter tiled roofs without moulding and eaves and some of the door and window spans simply cut out of the façade without the traditional masonry framing. The porch theme is still there, but the “pleasure house” is nowhere to be seen.
The curious impression that remains, particularly when we compare these houses with the Vila Ema’s rusticity, is that they constitute something which, due to hesitation as to which route to take, stopped at the half-way point – the houses are hybrids resulting from a failed synthesis. Incapacity on the part of the architect? The impossibility of achieving a synthesis of the two models? Perhaps a mixture of both… In the designs he used to illustrate the Madeira Houses, Tavares already revealed the difficulty he had in arriving at a synthesis of the two architectural expressions, meaning that he hesitated between the pastiche [j] and the challenging commitment to the “modern” [k]. It is nevertheless curious that, a few years later in his book on the “Portuguese dwelling”15, he presented amongst the examples of “houses” he built in Funchal, a house with a decidedly modernist profile – a pineapple in the land of bananas that would never had made it into Reis Gomes’s book.
So everything would indicate that the models generated by romantic and picturesque regionalism were only viable in the context of a certain stylistic immobility. They were incapable of evolving or being updated without forfeiting their authenticity. In its immobile and rigid rusticity, Vila Ema is testament to precisely that. It does not say to us “new things in the language that was always very much ours” – as advocated by the architect himself when he spoke of the “Madeira house”. On the contrary, it repeated old things in a vocabulary that was already archaic for the period. Perhaps for this reason there is something tragic and, at the same time, grotesque in the restrained beauty of this house, with the romanticism of its gothic arch seeking to evoke long-gone days, lost glories and ana-chronistic dreams of a rural and backward country, which, through the late arrived of Raul Lino, Madeira also made its own.
Some ambiguities relating to regionalist architecture
All regionalist doctrines have as their point of departure the idea that societies contain a nucleus or essence that must be unveiled and preserved.16 This is something which, in Portuguese culture, is made manifest in the Romantic thought of Herculano through the idea of the national “type”. As far as architecture is concerned, the decisive factors would be: geographic location, climate, customs, traditional techniques and local materials. “Architecture, as an art,” – wrote Reis Gomes – “is an aesthetic modality of the spirit of each people, closely connected to the customs and conditions that surround it.”17
Industrialisation, standardisation and uniformisation were seen as the main threat to this genuine and coherent world. It was against that threat that the regionalists maintained their struggle, be it through radical opposition to all forms of modernism, as in the case of Raul Lino, or by trying to tame it by impregnating it with local themes and expressiveness, as in the case of Reis Gomes. A struggle of ambiguities that was later to flame up again with the Survey on Regional Portuguese Architecture carried between 1955 and 1960 by what was then known as the National Union of Architects. The survey once more led to the reinterpretation of popular architecture, as it was studied now under a scientific eye seemingly devoid of romantic fancies.
The truth, however, is that between the insular regionalists of the 1930s and the post-war generation of architects the only differences of note had to do with the iconographic material that was considered relevant for generating architecture that was rooted in the place. While the former succumbed to an eclectic hotchpotch that did not distinguish the erudite expression from the popular, nor the decorative plan from the structural, the latter limited themselves to the so-called popular expression, incorporating into it the outwards signs to which their modernist training attributed most significance: rationality, formal constraint and economy of resources.
Another of the problems of the regionalist option was always defining the boundaries of the region. The northwest of the Iberian Peninsula? The Mediterranean? Madeira? Macaronesia? Portugal? In all of these one can find constants and variants. Only in communities with a high degree of isolation – those that existed in the pre-industrial world with a predominantly agrarian economy – was it possible to establish cultural differentiations with a certain degree of stability. In that past, of which today we can only conserve certain vestiges, it was indeed possible to link cultural specificities to regions. The world of instant communication we live in now has made that much more difficult.
This difficulty in defining territories and establishing the constants of our architecture has always been present in all forms of regionalism. In Raul Lino, who was as quick to recognise that “given the ethnographic variety and differences in climates and landscapes that exist on the continent, it is no surprise that there is no single type Portuguese house type”18 as he was to peremptorily assert that: “There can be no doubt in affirming that the characteristic and unmistakeable Portuguese house exists, at least as far as its external appearance is concerned.”19 The difficult is reflected in Popular Architecture in Portugal 20 which informs us that “between a village in Minho and a hilltop farm in the Alentejo there are much more profound differences than there are between certain Portuguese and Greek constructions” before going on to conclude that “the typical characteristics of Portuguese architecture” are “sobriety, horizontality and hermeticism”.
Determining the constants or the essence of a type of architecture, be it national or regional, is a “decantation” process with uncertain results, where the material gathered depends very much on the “filter” used by the investigator. An ungrateful task for critics, historians and architects, in this challenge but it is perhaps the latter who have the final word – not because of what they write or the coherence of the principles they defend, or the faith they place in them, but for the way in which they interpret the motifs that best serve their art in plastic terms.|
1 Raul Lino. Arquitectura: a propósito da Casa Madeirense. Das artes e da história da Madeira. Vol. 6, nº 132 (1962), p. 42-44.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Raquel Henriques da Silva. A “Casa Portuguesa” e os novos programas, 1900-1920. in Annette Becker; Ana Tostões; Wilfried Wang (orgs.). Arquitectura do século XX: Portugal. Lisboa : Prestel ; Portugal-Frankfurt, 1997, p. 17.
5 [Letter from the chairman of the Association of Fruit and Vegetable Exporters of the Island of Madeira], 1942. Raul Lino Archives, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Art Library.
6 João dos Reis Gomes. Casas madeirenses. Colaboração artística de Edmundo Tavares da Escola de Belas Artes de Lisboa Artistic collaboration from Edmundo Tavares from the Lisbon College of Fine Arts. Funchal : Diário da Madeira, 1937.
7 Cf. See Teresa Vasconcelos. O plano Ventura Terra e a modernização do Funchal (primeira metade do século XX). Col. Funchal 500 Anos, nº 9. Funchal : Funchal 500 Anos, 2008, p. 68, n. 228.
8 Cf. See José Manuel Fernandes. A arquitectura em Por-tugal nos anos 1930-40: do Modernismo ao Estado Novo : heranças, conflitos, contextos. In CONGRESSO DOCOMOMO, 5, Barcelona, 2005. Actas. [Consult. June 1, 2011]. Disponível em: https://upcommons.upc.edu/revistes/bitstream/2099/ 2364/1/60_67_manuel_fernandes.pdf
9 Edmundo Tavares. A habitação portuguesa: casas modernas. Lisboa : Bertrand, 1951, p. 22-23.
10 João dos Reis Gomes. Op. cit., p. 78.
11 Edmundo Tavares. Op. cit., p. 22-23.
12 Cf. See Raul Lino. Arquitectura: a propósito da casa madeirense. Op. cit., p. 42-44.
13 Ibid.
14 Memória descritiva da casa para a Ex.ma Senhora D. Ema Favila Vieira. 1942. Espólio Raul Lino Archive, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Biblioteca de Arte Art Library.
15 Edmundo Tavares. Op. cit.
16 See Alan Colquhoun. Critique of Regionalism. in Vincent B. Canizaro (ed.). Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity and Tradition. New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, p. 141-145.
17 João dos Reis Gomes. Op. cit., p. 82.
18 Raul Lino. A casa portuguesa. Ed. Exposição Portuguesa em Sevilha. Lisboa : Imprensa Nacional, 1929, p. 6.
19 Ibid., p.56.
20 Sindicato Nacional dos Arquitectos (ed. lit.). Arquitectura popular em Portugal. Lisboa : SNA, 1961.