History becoming Theory: George Kubler and Portuguese Plain

Abstract

American art historian George Kubler travelled and lived in Portugal between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s to research his book Portuguese Plain Architecture: Between Spices and Diamonds 1521–1706 (1972). The premise of the book was to analyze the architectural production of Portugal during a period of political and economic crisis between 1500 and 1700, a period that Kubler called “between Spices and Diamonds.” This paper suggests that the notions in Portuguese Plain, far from being an objective study of Portuguese architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, blended with the social, political, and economic situation of the country at the time of the book’s writing. Kubler was likely also influenced by the apparent remoteness of the land, which might itself have suggested the appropriateness of a poor and austere architecture. Kubler’s notions became a standard trope, and from the 1990s onwards the idea of a national austere architecture has become part of the dominant architectural discourse in Portugal.

Keywords:

• historiography
• George Kubler
• plain architecture
• national character
• Portugal

Notes

¹ George Kubler, Note, 97-M-22 Box 7, George Alexander Kubler Papers (MS 843). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

² Paulo Varela Gomes, “Quatre Batailles en Faveur d’une Architecture Portugaise” [Four Battles for Portuguese Architecture], in Points de Repère: Architectures du Portugal [Marking Points: Architectures of Portugal]. E. 91 (Brussels: Fondation pour l’Architecture, 1991), 21–62.

³ Peter Palumbo, Alejandro Aravena, Carlos Jimenez, Glenn Murcutt, Juhani Pallasmaa, Renzo Piano, Karen Stein, and Martha Thorne, The Pritzker Architecture Prize. Jury Citation: Eduardo Souto de Moura, 2011, http://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/2011/jury/. A statement of a similar fashion was made in the 1992 Pritzker Prize jury’s citation regarding the work of Siza, connecting the simplicity of the architect’s work with moral values: “Like the early Modernists, his shapes, moulded by light, have a deceptive simplicity about them; they are honest”; John Carter-Brown, Giovanni Agnelli, Ada Louise Huxtable, Ricardo Legorreta, Toshio Nakamura, Lord Rothschild, and Bill Lacy, Jury Citation: Álvaro Siza, 1992, http://www.pritzkerprize.com/1992/jury/.

⁴ Vera Sacchetti, Q+A>Eduardo Souto de Moura, 2011, http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5,313#.VhJgJtbFuRs/.

⁵ Barack Obama, Ceremony Speech: Pritzker Architecture Prize, 2011, http://www.pritzkerprize.com/2011/ceremony-speech-1/.

⁶ There is an essential difference between the expressions “architecture in Portugal” and “Portuguese architecture.” The first refers to the architecture that was made or designed in the country, while the second implies that there is something essentially national which is intrinsically different from architecture made in other countries. This view is actually part of a fallacy, since most architectural practices since the fifteenth century have been in some ways influenced by external agents and by each other.

⁷ Pedro Vieira de Almeida, A Arquitectura No Estado Novo [Architecture During Estado Novo] (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2002).

⁸ “Sindicato nacional dos arquitectos,” in Arquitectura popular em Portugal [Popular Architecture in Portugal] (Lisbon: Sindicato dos arquitectos, 1961).

⁹ George Kubler, Portuguese Plain Architecture: Between Spices and Diamonds, 1521–1706 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 3.

¹⁰ Paulo Varela Gomes, “Arquitectura não-alinhada” [Non-Aligned Architecture], JA: Jornal Arquitectos [JA: Architect's Journal], no. 200 (2001): 5–9.

¹¹ As Kubler noted, the character of a work of art does not depend on the date of its production, since some contemporary objects may share baroque qualities; there are qualities to be found across time, and plain architecture shared the qualities of modernism. See George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1962).

¹² Kubler, Portuguese Plain Architecture, 3.

¹³ Eliana Sousa-Santos, “Portuguese Plain Architecture: History Opening a Closed Sequence,” Revista de História da Arte, 10 (2012): 176–87.

¹⁴ Álvaro Siza, “The Proletarian ‘Island’ as a Basic Element of the Urban Tissue,” Lotus International, no. 13 (1976): 80.

¹⁵ Ibid., 87.

¹⁶ Kubler, Portuguese Plain Architecture, 3.

¹⁷ A very incisive portrait of the cultural context of the country in the 1980s and 1990s was rendered in the paper “A Cultura de Direita em Portugal” [Right Wing Culture in Portugal], by António Araújo, which presented at the conference “O Estado das direitas na democracia Portuguesa” [The State of Right Wing Movements in Portugal] at ICS University of Lisbon, February 2012; António Araújo, A cultura de direita em Portugal, 2014, http://malomil.blogspot.pt/2014/01/a-direita-portuguesa-contemporanea.html.

¹⁸ This latter expanded to the departments of architecture of Coimbra University and Minho University.

¹⁹ Varela Gomes, “Quatre Batailles,” 21–2.

²⁰ Varela Gomes, “Arquitectura Não-Alinhada,” 9.

²¹ Ibid., 6.

²² MoMA, SAAL S. Victor Social Housing, Porto, Portugal, 2012, http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=161,432 (accessed October 25, 2014), emphasis added.