The aesthetic of Lisbon: Writing and practices during the early 20th century

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

My PhD thesis. Follows the abstract, the thesis can be read in its entirety here. This study tries to tackle the notion of “urban aesthetics” as it was articulated throughout the first three decades of the 20th century in Portuguese writing on the city, and practised in different forms of spatial production. A diffuse vocabulary – estética urbana, estética citadina, estética da cidade, das edificações, da rua … – signals a persistent understanding of the city as a work of art, both in the way it was experienced – an “urban aesthetic” – and contrived – an “urban aesthetics.

Monumentalidade e espaço público em Lourenço Marques nas décadas de 1930 e 1940: dois casos de estudo

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract: Lourenço Marques, actual Maputo (Mozambique), is subjected to a series of aesthetic interventions in its public space during the 1930s e 1940s. These seek to “monumentalize” and “portugalize” the city, responding to its recently acquired status as capital of the Colony. Two important monuments appear as especially important and exemplary: the Padrão de Guerra, a first war memorial (1935), and the monument to the hero of the “pacification campaigns” of the 1890s, Mouzinho de Albuquerque (1940). Around these monuments, a large number of commemorative and celebrative practices is developed. Such practices posit the monument as a “national allegory” and reproduce, in the context of a modern city, auratic and cult values. As such, they add an important dimension to the monument’s role in the authoritarian reformulation of the city’s public space as an “imperial” space, as well as in the putative hegemonization of the representations of the community imagined as a “Nation.” They allow, therefore, to approach the political-ideological use and utility of the monument within the organization of public space.

Academic theses on Paper-cloud - Gerbert's archive of writings

The aesthetic of Lisbon: Writing and practices during the early 20th century

Monumentalidade e espaço público em Lourenço Marques nas décadas de 1930 e 1940: dois casos de estudo