The New State, Architecture and Modernism

Abstract

This paper aims to address the architecture of the Portuguese New State (1933–1974) and discuss its modernist nature. Firstly, the historiographic interpretation which opposes the two phenomena is characterised and questioned. Secondly, an alternative proposal for interpretation is presented and grounded. The fully modernist nature of the architecture of New State is argued by the agency of two major contributions: the international histo- riography on the relationship between modernism and fascism, which has been increasingly questioning and overcoming the previously identified con- tradiction between the terms; and the historiography of the development of other areas during the New State that show no contradiction in the mobili- zation of science and technology for the pursuit of a societal project contrary to the liberal political matrix of the Enlightenment. The maximalist definition of modernism advanced by Roger Griffin is adopted, thus explaining it as a heterogeneous set of palingenetic reactions, developed between the second half of the nineteenth century and the end of the Second World War, which aimed to counterbalance the consequences of the process of western mod- ernisation perceived as adverse.