O problema (e algumas soluções) das casas portuguesas. Modelli di organizzazione dello spazio dell'abitare sociale in Portogallo [1989-2007]

Throughout the whole 20th Century, the urban issue is inextricably interwoven with the architectural research about new residential models. From the early formulations of the Utopist Socialists to the siedlungen of social-democratic Germany, from Le Corbusier and Russian Constructivists' projects to the new paradigms of the urban Dutch regeneration, the studies which were carried out around the typological and distributive aspects of housing propose and interpret new living ways, reflecting at the same time specific ideas for the city. In the latest years, it seems that the residential question has been once again playing a central role in the articulation of the political discourse about city building. The discipline deals again with collective housing, bringing back to the heart of the debate an issue which was abandoned at the end of the 20th Century. The main approach oscillates in most cases between extolling the idea of environmental sustainability – identifying social housing as a privileged field for technological experimentation – and a political and programmatic approach concerning the opportunities that building development itself offers in terms of reactivation of economic cycles of production. From a strictly architectural perspective, typological-distributive aspects are rarely addressed, being the research about the ways of living the domestic and public spaces more often subordinated to romantic and evocative considerations about a communitarian and pre-urban life. This approximation is not surprising, given that the production of the last thirty years is consistent with a neoliberal model of privatization typical of the 80s and 90s which, coupled with the crisis of modern project, mechanically reproduces trivialized and stereotyped models of housing and urban living. If what we just said gives a general idea about the drift of the inevitable supremacy of speculation on disciplinary practice, this assumption represents only a superficial step and prompts us to further investigate the current state of architectural research on housing. The present study, starting from the identification of a defined geographical and chronological area, proposes a systematic analysis of recent housing production. It could be defined as an attempt to identify recurring and innovative models for defining space, retrieving a scientific knowledge which can offer operational tools for the project. In order to conduct this analysis, the research focuses on the production of social housing. Due to their own nature as well as to the fact that they are framed within extraordinary logics and conditions, public housing programs are in fact a privileged setting for experimentation. In a way, they set the project on the edge of the market, still rigidly framing it within the economic and regulatory context. Therefore the work, even considering the factors that affect the practice, develops a scientific method of classification that is configured as an operational tool for the project, with obvious educational potential. In the first part, the dissertation proposes a systematic analysis of the production of social housing in Portugal emphasizing the morphological evolution of the disciplinary proposals in different historical moments, identifying periods of "homogeneous" production. In these sense, from the analysis of the scientific production, the research and publications that address the issue of housing in Portugal emerges as a study analyzing in a systematic way the problem of the house, from the origins to date remains to be done. Starting from the analysis performed in the first part, the second part of the thesis compares some recent Portuguese productions (framed in the activity of the Instituto Nacional de Habitação) with three residential projects by Alvaro Siza (Bouça, São Vítor and Malagueira), trying to show how the mechanisms of spatial organization of housing translate ideas, attitudes and specific proposals for the city, interpreting and defining strategies for construction of the urban space, combining particularities of the territory, history and memory.