Where local modernities meet: The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Iraq, 1957-1973

The Gulbenkian Hall on Tayeran Square in Baghdad - one of the few venues there where works of Iraqi modern art can be seen today - was designed and built between 1957 and 1962 by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, aimed at supporting the city's budding modern arts scene with its first purpose-built gallery. Importantly, it was also intended as a demonstration of the foundation's seriousness of purposes in strengthening the cultural, educational, scientific and public health-related infrastructure of Iraq - a purpose to which the institution, established in Lisbon in 1956, had decided to channel part of its oil revenues, largely originated in the country. In the tightrope exercise of combining its own financial viability with its philanthropism, the Foundation thereby helped establishing the material and intellectual backbone of modern-day Iraq, through very diverse means. This exercise included approving around 250 'construction grants' in Iraq, 600 scholarships for graduate and post-graduate training, home and abroad, and material support ranging from library collections to television equipment. The operation peaked with al-Shaab Stadium in Baghdad (1957-1966), meant as a contribution for the advancement of Iraqi physical education. Focusing on the sports complex and arts centre initiatives as epitomes of post-colonial, soft-power diplomacy processes and products, this paper examines how the archive of a philanthropy in Portugal can shed light on the unseen history of ostensibly distant objects that, despite circumstances over the past three decades, have entered Iraqi collective memory as beacons of normality, while enquiring the ways by which seemingly unconnected cultures of modern built-environment production come into contact, yielding new, hybrid outputs.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Punishment, re-education and agriculture: Portuguese internal and imperial penal colonisation in the nineteenth century

This paper considers a set of Portuguese state-funded projects for agricultural colonisation using coerced subjects. In the second half of the nineteenth century, mounting urbanisation, joblessness, and deprivation, resulting in depopulated countryside and a fractious urban milieu, drove experts to seek international examples for institutionalisation and rehabilitation through agricultural labour. Placing those classified as ‘criminals’ but also new outlaw categories such as ‘beggars’ and ‘vagrants’, as well as ‘undisciplined’ and ‘unimputable’ minors, at the forefront of colonising initiatives in areas characterised as empty or unproductive gave rhetorical impetus to settlement plans and to claims of territorial sovereignty and self-sufficiency in imperial and metropolitan contexts. The article examines a range of experiments: in Alentejo in southern Portugal, where the youth re-education colony of Vila Fernando was the country’s counterpart to the French colonie of Mettray, and in Angola, where penal colonies for exiled convicts supported the effective occupation of the hinterland. We argue that, despite their differences, metropolitan and imperial projects can be addressed using the same analytical framework as they share an allied set of practices, cultures, technologies, and agents, mobilised to achieve common goals: economic exploitation, population and territory management, confinement, discipline, punishment, and re-education.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Vítor Figueiredo

O trabalho de Vítor Figueiredo (1929-2004), arquiteto português com um percurso que marcou a cultura arquitetónica no País nas décadas finais do século XX, permanece relativamente pouco conhecido do público não-especializado, e mesmo dos seus pares. Vítor Figueiredo desenvolveu uma importante obra construída e não construída, dedicada à habitação social – campo em que foi um dos principais criadores, e pensadores, daquele período em Portugal –, instalações de ensino superior, equipamentos desportivos e religiosos e edifícios de serviços. A reflexão sobre a posição do arquiteto no mundo, a que recorreu, como ferramenta de projeto, com uma intensidade incomum, terá sido o seu maior contributo para o pensamento no campo disciplinar da arquitetura: uma reflexão que, através da palavra escrita e falada, ficou registada, mais do que nos formatos convencionais de publicação, em memórias descritivas, entrevistas e comunicações. O contributo de Vítor Figueiredo abrangeu um leque amplo de escalas, exemplar de uma formação como arquiteto e “ordenador do espaço” . A partir de uma sólida base de princípios do Movimento Moderno, fomentada pelo ambiente de abertura e liberdade de expressão em que, no Porto, se formou e começou a trabalhar,Vítor Figueiredo explorou novas abordagens em consonância com movimentos como o que, em especial depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial, procurou repor o Homem e as suas necessidades, ambições, contradições e angústias no centro das preocupações da arquitetura. Para o arquiteto, estas fizeram parte do ato de desenhar e construir a todos os níveis, desde o detalhe construtivo ao planeamento territorial.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio