Overview

Foreword by Adrian Forty Focusing on the design and building practices developed in the Portuguese region of the Algarve over four decades, from the first signs of Modern Movement influence to the eve of mass-tourism development, this book adopts a peripheral standpoint to look at three essential tropes of twentieth-century architecture - modernism, regionalism and popular building traditions commonly known as `vernacular'. This examination provides the starting point for a discussion about central and peripheral agendas, contemporary theorisations and concrete built environment production, the work of reputed architects and little-known actors and, more widely, the need for architectural history to overcome the constraints of the canon. This study of a region of Portugal known as a holiday destination but not for its architecture shows the potential of fringe building practices to question established constructs and to galvanise our understanding of identity construction (national, regional, local), knowledge transfers and the circulation of ideas in any given context. It also provides an opportunity to observe architectural regionalism at work in a country whose modern architecture became noted overseas solely through its inclusion in the `Critical Regionalism' narrative, and its designers in the `site-sensitive' category - while the background of this portrait remains unrecognised internationally, and often over-simplified in the national sphere. Systematically drawing on a range of building-related records - from local planning archives to government departments to architects' papers -, specialised and general media, oral accounts and fieldwork, the book establishes what was built or designed in / for the Algarve, when it was built, by whom and for whom, and under what circumstances (political, social and economic; local, regional, national and international), weaving this account into a discussion of the building practices, discourses and debates, and architectural cultures at play in the region. Algarve Building is based on the doctoral dissertation that won the Royal Institute of British Architects President's Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis, 2013.

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9781472456861

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Ricardo Agarez, University of Ghent, Belgium

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