Between tradition and modernity: an open street block in the Avenidas Novas, Lisbon

Abstract

In Lisbon, there are few street blocks opening their interior space to the city. The existing open streets blocks were built around 1940, the year of the Exhibition of the Portuguese World, an event for the political promotion of the dictatorial regime that represented an inflection in a policy of modernity of the nation. This is an important year for portuguese architecture as it means the beginning of a new cycle after a decade of a relative opening of the regime to a number of works clearly referenced to the modern architecture that was being developed in Europe. In that year, 1940, architect Maurício Trindade Chagas designed the project for a housing block with a particular modern feature: its interior was accessible to public use, and the block could be crossed throughout a longitudinal axis designed for pedestrian traffic. This block stands in front of the so-called Casa da Moeda, a remarkable modern building clearly influenced by Dutch architecture. This paper characterizes the conceptual ambivalence of the project for the street block: the language of the Estado Novo and the modernity of the block type. The main events in the construction of the street block are framed in their time and the models for the design of this new block are identified.