Found in Translation
Nuno Portas' readings on Team 10 and the post-functionalist debate 
by Nuno Grande

In the late 1950s, the young student of architecture Nuno Portas started his career in Lisbon (as a designer, critic and editor of the “Arquitectura” magazine), based on an inexhaustible curiosity and an extensive personal collation of papers, projects and manifestos around the critical review of the Modern Movement, then ongoing in Central Europe – particularly the Italian “neo-realist” views, the Scandinavian “organicist” experiences and the Central European “structuralist” tendencies.

The reflection he developed from this wide-ranging information was included in the first articles he wrote, the projects in which he took part – at Nuno Teotónio Pereira’s office – and the CODA thesis whereby he obtained his degree in 1959. He published there hundreds of case study “sheets”, which he outlined over those years, studying, among others, the projects of members of the newly formed Team 10, such as Alison and Peter Smithson, Candilis, Josic and Woods and Giancarlo De Carlo, and praising in his dissertation their contributions to the ongoing critical review. Like them, Portas became interested in the topic of “Habitat” (not just “Housing”) from a post-functionalist perspective, i.e. based on the relationships with the existing city and the processes of community life. It is no coincidence that his shared projects for the C Cell of the Olivais-Sul Quarter (1959-1964) or for the Church of Sagrado Coração de Jesus (1961-1974) recover the street, the courtyard and the square as central compositional elements, close to the notion of “cluster”, defended by the Smithson couple, for example, in their projects for Golden Lane (1952) and The Economist (1964).

These readings of Team 10’s internal debate continued in the books Portas published throughout the 1960s – “A Arquitectura para Hoje” (1964) and “A Cidade como Arquitectura” (1969) – in which he “translated” or “reinvented” many of the concepts resulting from that debate. During those years, Portas wrote about the “open programme” (a theme dear to Aldo van Eyck), the “city-territory” (reminiscent of Candilis and Bakema) and the “meta-programme” (not far from the concept of “mat-building” later initiated by Alison Smithson). He shared with all of them the structuralist vision that architecture is an “open work” (like the text was for Umberto Eco), receptive to time, change and appropriation by citizens. In this sense, in the transition to the 1970s, Portas studied the “evolutionary habitat” and the processes of civic “participation”, the latter topic intersecting contemporary proposals by Giancarlo De Carlo. This process of reflection would find its culmination in Portas’ political experience in the post-25 April 1974 revolution period, most specifically in the housing policies he put in place as Secretary of State in the first interim government (such as the celebrated SAAL).

In short, Nuno Portas was indeed the best Portuguese interpreter of Team 10’s ideology, introducing lasting gains – never losses – into this creative process of critical “translation”. Without it, Portugal would not have built its contemporary architectural culture.

Nuno Grande is associate professor at DARQ – the Architecture Department in the Faculty of Science and Technology of Coimbra University and researcher at the Centre for Social Studies from the same University. In 2009 he presented his doctoral thesis “Arquitecturas da Cultura: Política, Debate, Espaço. Génese dos Grandes Equipamentos Culturais da Contemporaneidade Portuguesa” at Coimbra University.