Theses defended

Modern Monumentality. The Student Centre of the University of Coimbra and the Architecture of Post-war Cultural Centres

Susana Constantino Silva

Public Defence date
March 12, 2018
Supervision
José António Bandeirinha
Abstract
This dissertation examines the Student Centre of the University of Coimbra (1954-1961) as a case study of the architectural qualities of the post-war cultural centres in Europe. In particular, this thesis explores the critical role played by a new disciplinary attitude that promoted the idea of New Monumentality as a key component for a more humanistic approach to architecture.

The research outputs presented in this work are organised according to a narrative sequence that begins with the post-war debate on the revision of the principles of the modern movement, to move on to the discussion of the role played by cultural buildings as spaces for civic expression and symbols of the revalorization of public space. Following this outline, this thesis aims at exploring how the cultural centres were able to articulate the trilogy Architecture, Culture and City. In the aftermath of the second-World War, cultural centres became the materialization of a more democratic access to culture, and of a new politics of regeneration of the historic centres of European cities. Hence, this thesis argues that cultural centres created the locus for a new experience of urban community, strengthening the symbolic role played by public buildings in the everyday life and identity of the European city. Cultural centres became a new type of public building, associated to an open and welcoming urban life, which could accommodate simultaneously different cultural activities, and provide leisure opportunities for the masses. Accordingly, the post-war cultural centres embodied a paradigm shift in the idea of the cultural building and its relation with the city and the surrounding public space.

After establishing this intellectual framework, the research focuses on the programme, the design and the critical reception of the Student Centre of the University of Coimbra as part of the plan for the new University of Coimbra campus. The Student Centre is presented as a counter-project to the rhetoric of classic monumentality of the other buildings built under the auspices of the campus masterplan and as a civic equipment that shares its urban and architectural references with the cultural and educational facilities promoted by the European welfare state. In the Portuguese context, however, the Estado Novo regime did not subscribe to the ideological principles that supported public commissioning of cultural buildings in post-war Europe. Thus, this thesis contends that the Student Centre of the University of Coimbra reproduces the model of the European cultural centre through architecture's disciplinary agency, rather than through the state's ideological agenda.

This thesis concludes asserting that the Student Centre of the University of Coimbra is the result of an architectural approach that deliberately emphasizes the aesthetical and material possibilities pertaining to the humanization of modern architecture discussed in the post-war CIAM, especially the synthesis of the arts and the valorisation of the human scale. As a result, this complex trigged a paradigm shift in the concept and design of collective facilities for culture and leisure in Portugal, replicating what many other cultural centres were doing in Europe, and thus contributing to a new experience of the public space.

Key words: Architecture, New Monumentality, Cultural Centre, Student Centre of the University of Coimbra