Life versus Architecture: rationalist ideals facing popular taste, from Pessac to Malagueira

Abstract

The clash between the aesthetics produced by rationalist ideals of the modern movement and the taste of the dwellers is always present, in urban extensions designed in the XX century. In plans based on single-family housing, this clash led to interesting phenomena of physical transformation of the proposals of the architect, creating hybrid constructions in which it is difficult to recognise the original design. The “Quartiers Modernes Frugès” (1924-27), design by Corbusier in Pessac (near Bordeaux, in France), is a famous case study of this phenomenon. Commissioned by the French industrial entrepreneur Henry Frugès, it began as a very ambitious plan that aimed to build one hundred and thirty-five houses disposed around a commercial square, but was not completed according to the original plan. Furthermore, some of the houses were altered by the dwellers in a way that was completely unexpected to Corbusier, which commented on the fact with the famous ironic statement: ‘It is life that is always right and the architect who’s wrong.’ In Portuguese architecture, mainly in the SAAL Program, we can find interesting examples of this confrontation between life and architecture. However, between the experience of the interventions in Porto and the later construction of the urban extension in Malagueira, designed by Álvaro Siza nearby Évora, we can find a very important change: in the second case, the posture of the architect is different, aiming to work with the uncertainty of the final image of the dwellings and leaving to the future owner the possibility to adapt it to his own taste. This different posture makes a great difference in the final results of the intervention as a whole, allowing it to become diversified and alive.