From Lisbon to Capri. And back again.

Some years ago (more than I wished, hélas), some spanish friends of mine came to visit. They are more or less my age and both have a degree: his on law and hers on an humanistic field. Sensitive to arts, we all shared a passionate interest to cinema and other forms of artistic expressions, but the movies industry, stars and characters, directors and influential works, in particular, were very much discussed and analysed among us. By then, they were living in Salamanca, a very beautiful city I had already had the pleasure of visiting, a site-seeing guided by them that included the university campus, with that fabulous mole of architecture, carved like a yellow precious stone sculpture, where Spaniards and foreign students over the centuries attended classes. Older than Coimbra University, but from the same centuria, they both rivalled in terms of quality, in spite Salamaca's supremacy repeatedly took over. That accounts for their curiosity to visit Lisbon' s Cidade Universitária, placed by now in the middle of the city and that some busy streets unfortunately were crossing.

Their disappointment was to me hard in fact to understand. Lisbon University is a recent location of an old institution, built in the middle of the XXth century, in modern architecture. This I thought they knew, but found out afterwards that was not the case; the fact that such an old institution could occupy such modern facilities, that was something they didn't go along with; I later realised that modern architecture was not at all a preference for them in terms of architectural taste and that those same words and 'university' in the same phrase was something they considered appallling.

This episode came to mind when I was admiring a piece of beauty, an amazing piece of architecture placed in from of the ocean, somehow a part of it, without belonging. I was looking at the Villa Malaparte photos, in Capri, and inevitably reminded of both Adalberto Libera, the architect, and Jean-Luc Godard, the director, that immortalized it in the last scenes of the Le Mépris (1963). The Malaparte building was designed in 1937, by Libera, in close relation with Curzio Malaparte, an italien writer and later a filmmaker, too.

Intended as a kind of place of seclusion, to answer to the desires of Malaparte, the villa was built on the point of a cliff, a promontory facing the sea and can only be accessed by foot, or by boat.

The most remarkable feature (apart from the location, geometrical shape, contrasts, asymmetries, interior disposition and so on) is undoubtedly the flight of exterior stairs leading to the solarium. And the solarium itself.

Conceived independently, unaccessible from the interior, the solarim tops the full extension of the house. A curved wall, somehow with the shape of a comma, or suggesting a wave, near the entrance, allows privacy and fractures the blowing breezes. The place is accessed by the large, continuous, trapezoidal flight of stairs, that descends and descends, more and more narrowing on the way down, 'till finally, plunging among the vegetation, disappears from sight, in a curvilinear movement. Like some hanging bridge, suspended between the house and the rocks, dimmed exit, out of sight, stresses to the islander viewer the feeling of isolation. The whole house seems surrounded by stairs, some narrow descending on the side, to patios and sea, like hair whirling around the head of the building, where different sided windows keep viewing the waves.

The way the house adjusts to the landscape is absolutely astonishing. There is a delicacy of form and shape that confirms itself in ways of a strong affirmative architectural structure, but at the same time that doesn't impose volumetrically speaking, quite the opposite, it blends with the landscape, in an almost undetectable feature.

And I quote from ArchDaily (from whom some of these pictures were borrowed): "This sensitivity is also reinforced in the choice of materials, rejecting the use of the 'concrete characteristic' of other modern buildings of the period. Villa Malaparte was built with local stone extracted from the site itself; as a result, it is as if the house has emerged from the landscape over which it is placed, the stairs seem to exceed the cliff, creating a new height on it." A piece of information very much appreciated on this corner, particularly concerned with our environmental footprint.

Their description of the stairs is accurate from a landside point of view. A visitor arriving on foot, leaving the company of trees and rocks behind, will most certain have the impression of facing a flight of stairs that exceeds the cliff, some stairway to the air, a stairway to heaven.

A stairway to heaven to Brigitte Bardot, indeed, considering that Godard's movie used that same spot and "the lady we all know" from previous pictures (especially And God Created Woman, 1956), to make it appealing in all possible ways. And it did. She became an international star after that, Godard attracted upon himself the public and the critics eyes to this day.

But another player regained a considerable notoriety with Godard' s movie: villa Malaparte and, to be precise, the solarium and stairs on which Bardot and Piccoli played the separation scene. The way it was filmed and the associations it brings have grown inside the mind of the viewers, in a succession of connected ideas that are dear to the public: so much so that it became an icon for French New Wave. The scene can be watched (with comments from Malaparte) in the ArchDaily page mentioned above.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl5dkg

But the solarium is also the setting for the last scene of the film, in which Fritz Lang (the director playing himself), wants to capture Ulysses first look when he returns home to Ithaca, "le premier regard d' Ulisses, quand il revoit sa patrie" (Lang's line). Of course, consistently with the rest of the film, made of contrasts and progressing by contrasts, the character Ulysses is filmed all the way facing the light and turning his back to the camera, making impossible for the viewer to see his eyes and adding more uneasiness to the perplexities already produced. But making possible for the viewer (and underlining it) to see what Ulysses sees. The sea. The infinite blue calm sea, touching the infinite blue of the sky. No piece of land, no island, nothing more than just that blue and silence (and the command: "Silencio!"). Fine.

This figure of Ulysses standing alone on the solarium reminds us the lonely wanders of Piccoli, sometime before, and that of the lonely Bardot lying on the sunshine, all on the same set: that big plateau, close to the infinity of sea and sky, where they seem small, insignificant, one zigzagging in search, the other already laid in sacrifice to the gods, the same ones Ulysses seem to be addressing with his back to the camera and his hands in the air.

No better place could be chosen to present such a scene, with the effectiveness this one delivered. The architecture of the building, merging land and ocean, was able to play also an important part in the full apprehension of its meaning: contrasting the direct sun of the South and the cool dark interior, midway between land and sea, humans complying with gods.

Libera's master piece is clean and simple.

But it is not a light-airy structure. Likewise none of the other buildings created by Libera. The most characteristic feature they share is the way they stand on the floor, strongly, horizontally. This same feature can be found in most all the architecture design of that period. Mid century Modern Architecture conveys a steady presence, a confident one.

https://www.italianways.com/adalberto-libera-my-father/

And so does Lisbon University campus, planned in the late 30's, post pone during the WW II, and finally built after that. Porfírio Pardal Monteiro was the architect in charge and mentor behind three of the main buildings: Reitoria (1961), Faculdade de Direito (1957) and Faculdade de Letras (1958). His were also the designs for the tecnical campus, the first zone to be implemented and built, the Instituto Superior Técnico (1942); afterwards came Centro de Medicina Desportiva (1959) and Biblioteca Nacional (1969).

Reitoria da Universidade de Lisboa (photo above)

Instituto Superior Técnico (photo above)

Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa (photo above)

Only Faculdade de Medicina de Lisboa new building (1952) was conceived by a different architect, the german Hermann Distel. It is part of the Hospital de Santa Maria (Lisbon's biggest hospital).

Hospital de Santa Maria (photo above)

Connections have been made with this modern architectural design and the fact that it serves many of the old fascist regimes that strived in Europe by then. I find this views particularly narrowing and obtuse. Many artists have defended this or that political party, or regime, some from the right, others on the left wing of the political spectrum. They might have even collaborated with a totalitarian regime. But even so, I don't think that the quality of the art they might have produced cannot be appreciated as such. Unfortunately, many portuguese are still suffering from that trauma and particular ways of placing themselves in the world and keep confronting those views, or keep a loud silence about them, which talks exactly the same way. But that was not the case with my friends. A litmus test was our visit to Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. They found the building ugly, both inside and the outside structure. I concluded that they simple don´t understand Modern Architecture, which they, therefore, underrate.

Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (a presentation)

I actually love it. In spite the fact that not all modern buildings are "things of wounder", of course. But good and bad performances cross everywhere the field of human entreprises displaying, modern architecture included.

Buildings speak to people. And environments as well. One interacts with the other, in ways that we apprehend more than understand immediately. They may create a setting to which we feel attracted to, or not. A setting that one is agreeably using or is predisposed to do so; where one may feel inspired, at home or, at least, at ease. And I do think that Modern Architecture was able to do all of this. Time in-between wars and specially after WW II followed a large expanding rhythm to many European cities, some of them (too many, indeed), recovering from intense war destruction. Europe swallowed her prime and sorrows, clench her teeth and began rebuilding. The relieve feeling gave way to hope, and next to confidence. Never before things were made to last more: the use of strong, long-lasting, enduring materials transmitting a sense of stability, a sense in want that war time had help to gear. And building lines were solidly hitting the ground, reinforced by the horizontallity of design and use of space and in close relation to the environment and climate conditions.

But very soon they had to adapt to the growing demand for available homes, and flats became a reality instead of houses. Flats that had to match a working middle class, with homes that women could manage after work. Mainly, a different city life now demanded practical, comfortably and affordable places to rest, green parks to take the family on weekends, nearby schools and day cares, and amenities. In order to respond, buildings rose to the skies and square foot became more and more scarce; inside materials were cheap and durability a mere word from the pass. The step to the mad consuming society had been taken. Architecture focused on containing costs for, now, money was in charge, not quality of life. Society on the whole was stressing 'have' instead of 'being'.