of VIEGAS, José Manuel, 'O sistema viário e de transportes no Plano Geral de Urbanização do Porto'. In Sociedade e Território, 3(7), Julho 1988, pp. 8-17.
6 Sistema de Informação para o Património Arquitectónico - Forte de Sacavém, IPA number
IPA.00005050, "Hospital de Santa Maria / Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Lisboa.In http://www.monumentos.pt/Site/APP_PagesUser/SIPA.aspx?id=5050 (accessed 19/04/2015)
7 Administração Regional de Saúde do Norte, I.P /Hospital de S. João E.P.E., In
http://portal.arsnorte.min-
saude.pt/portal/page/portal/ARSNorte/Conteúdos/Instituições/Porto/4D977E643E081E55E040140 A1102110A (accessed 19/04/2015)
8 See Caixa Geral de Depósitos,'Filiais e Agências - Filial do Porto' In
https://www.cgd.pt/Institucional/Patrimonio-Historico/Patrimonio-em-destaque/Documents/Filial- do-Porto-da-CGD.pdf (accessed 19/04/2015)
9 Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda. História da Casa da Moeda. In
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In 1814 Graham sent for his nephew John and together they started 'William & John Graham Company', a firm firstly based in Glasgow (Scotland) and Liverpool (England) and later on in London (1885), that produced the now famous Graham's Port Wine. This gave them riches, visibility and the respect of their peers. It also reinforced their bank credit.
In 1851, political and military turmoil had come and go and Portugal was beginning the 'Regeneração', a period of strong economic growth, modernisation and industrialisation. By then the UK was the manufacturing powerhouse of the world and its industrial revolution was creating a middle class of eager consumers.
Thriving in this, now modern, environment, the Grahams diversified their business investments. Keeping their port wine branch, in 1880 they ventured into the textile industry in Lisbon10. Although successful, labour wages were still
far lower in Porto — and raw materials for linen fabric were readily available in its northern fields. So they started 'Fábrica de Fiação e Tecidos da Boavista' [Boavista's Spinning and Fabric Mill] in Porto's western district. Their facilities, in Avenida da Boavista's fertile lands, were massive, occupying a big terrain of more than 24,7 acres [10 hectares], in the agricultural borough of Ramalde. It's logistics were good as the site was crossed by a natural stream (adequate for sewage of cloth-dyeing waters) and the premises were directly supplied by S. Pedro da Cova's coal mine [20 Km from Porto] through the tramway rails and network. So they grew: In 1905 the firm had 881 labourers and by 1939 they had climaxed with a workforce of 1473 workers, becoming one of the nation's largest textile industries.
Then came the War… Portugal's neutrality started looking suspicious to british markets; exporting by sea was now hazardous and competition hardened. By the 50s demand had plummeted, labour was cheaper elsewhere and competition with the now decolonized and developing-countries, fierce. In the mid-50s,
10 '[…] Em 1880 compram, em Lisboa, a Tinturaria e Estamparia do Braço de Prata. Tendo tido
sucesso e tendo verificado que no Porto seria mais rentável desenvolver os negócios têxteis, fundaram a mais importante fiação, tecelagem e tinturaria do país, a Fábrica de Fiação e Tecidos da Boavista […]'. The information on the William & John Graham Co. is part of an ongoing archival investigation. For a more general information see 'Porto, de Agostinho Rebelo da Costa aos Nossos Dias: Bairros da Cidade (XXIX): O Bairro da Boavista', In
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William & John Graham's spinnning and fabric mill was in dire straits and fighting debt. By the mid-50s their heirs eventually closed production.
They had other plans: struggling with bankruptcy and knowing that the city intentions were to open the VCI at their doorstep, aware of how it would impact on the price of land, they set out to become builders themselves and to start making money on the very premises of the old mill, with his enterprise based in Lisbon with easy access to Power, with building experience and connections within Porto's bureaucratic and technocratic municipal apparatus, Amadeu Gaudêncio seemed quite the logical choice for a building business partner.
In the Summer of 1959, these two worlds began merging. In July, the William & John Graham Company was transferred from the UK to Portugal, becoming based in the former headquarters of the spinning mill. Now, with a capital of 5.000 pounds [c. 800 contos] the society had two partners11. However, six
months later, in January, the society dropped textiles and embraced building changing its designation to 'Sociedade de Construções William Graham, SARL' [William Graham Building Society, Ltd.] and increasing its capital to 2.500 'contos'. The July founders, Amorim and Borges, were now joined by a stream of names, all of Lisbon — two of them from Alexandre Braga street — and, ending the long list "Amadeu Gaudêncio, of Castilho street, Lisbon" and "William Graham Junior & Company, of Alfândega street, Lisbon". The partners, including Gaudêncio, had all 100 shares, William Graham Junior & Company had 15 times that amount12.
http://portoarc.blogspot.pt/2013/01/bairros-das-cidade-xxix.html (accessed 16/04/2015) and the notes below.
11 In 1959 the first two founding partners were “Manuel Drummond Borges, married, commerce
manager, of Porto, and António Abel de Sousa Amorim, married, businessman, of Lisbon” each with a share of 2500 pounds [c. 402,5 contos]. The transfer of the Society from the UK to Portugal, took place in the Lisbon’s 9th Registry Office [Cartório] the 15th of July 1959. The William
& John Graham Company was now based in no. 1980, Avenida da Boavista, the former address of the Grahams’ spinning mill compound. Cfr. Conservatória do Registo Comercial do Porto [Commercial Registry Office - Porto], 'Livro de Matrículas das Sociedades' — Matrículas e Averbamentos no. 14.214 (ap. 19, 12/01/1960). See also Diário do Governo of 10/08/1959.
12 Conservatória do Registo Comercial do Porto, 'Livro de Inscrições', no. 58.890 (ap. 19,
12/01/1960). Supressing the door numbers, the founding partners full list is: (from Porto) "Doutor Manuel Drummond Borges, casado, gerente comercial, morador na Rua Marco de Canavezes; (from Lisbon) António Abel de Sousa Amorim, casado, comerciante, morador na Rua Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos; João Simões, Rua Alexandre Braga; Manuel Bravo, Av. Almirante Reis; Eduardo Laranjinha, Rua Alexandre Braga; Eng. António Branco Cabral, Rua António Enes; António Domingos Teixeira, R. Coelho da Rocha; Arnaldo Simões Silva, R. Sete, Restelo; Dr. Rui Vasco Preto Correia, R. António Granjo, Parede (…) Amadeu Gaudêncio, Rua Castilho 211 (…) William
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After all, the Grahams owned the land… An amazing plot of land: located just 1500 metres away from Rotunda's hub of services, in the green western axis to sea-and-sun, served by public transportation, by the future VCI and with an area of roughly 30 large football fields,13 its real-estate value was off-the-charts…
Nevertheless, funding was needed to develop the huge site. It will be Artur Cupertino de Miranda, a visionary millionaire founder and CEO of BPA, Banco Português do Atlântico, the largest private northern bank, who, trading funding for shareholding, will organise 'a big financial group articulated by BPA' and thus, effectively control the whole endeavour.
Controlling the several aspects and tasks of such an enormous project took centralisation: the Society, thus, created a 'technical cabinet' directed by Eng. Hélder Ribeiro da Silva who would also supervise and partake in all works of engineering. Assisting him were Engs. António Sarmento Pimentel das Neves, Renato Ramos Vieira Pousada and Manuel Jazelino Vieira da Costa. But civil engineers do not (should not) design buildings: inside the Society's technical cabinet a permanent architectural team was also formed, leaded by architect Agostinho Ricca Gonçalves, aided by his younger colleagues architects João Serôdio and José Carlos Magalhães Carneiro.
The whole idea was to create a 'real Residential Park, a soothing, relaxing zone, yet located at the confluence of the great North-South national traffic lines, near the heart of the city and Foz [i.e.: by the sea]. Besides, the height of the area offers a surprisingly vast panoramic'14. To the East and West of the Park there
would be a constant mix of dwellings and commerce, something new when compared with other ventures of the time, like Pasteleira, where CIAM
Graham Junior & Company, R. da Alfândega, Lisboa. Most of the partners, including Gaudêncio, had 100 shares, accounting for 100 'contos', but William Graham Junior & Company had 1.537,5 shares, with a value of 1.537,5 'contos'. Interestingly enough, Rua Alexandre Braga was the address of Gaudêncio's society headquarters…
13 As previously stated, the construction of the future VCI was to cut it in two, according to the
Auzelle 'Director Plan' approved in 1962, thus accessing the north or south of the region. Its dimensions were absurd: almost rectangular, its length faced Boavista Avenue for 630 metres, with a width of c. 500m, inwards, to Ramalde's fields. It had a perimeter of 2,2 Km, giving it an area of around 300.000 m2. For the construction of the ZRB, 'Zona Residencial da Boavista', by the SCWG, [Sociedade de Construções William Graham' 70.000 m2 were reserved. The rest was kept or sold. Note: the investigation at Porto's Building Registry Office [Conservatória do Registro Predial] by the author of this paper is still ongoing and this data is liable to be challenged by new material.
14 See Brochura Publicitária "Grande Parque Residencial da Boavista - Propriedade Horizontal -
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Corbusean guidelines on Zoning and on avoiding the 'street-corridor' were strictly followed15 [NOTE 15]. Nevertheless the urban teachings of the Modern
Movement were not to be thrown away, there was no Garden-City paradigm here: dwellings were to be housed in isolated Slabs and Towers,16 as well, the
difference being that other than the five first slabs, set perpendicular to the main avenue, allowing for pedestrian penetration into the Park, there would be streets and a physical continuity between the perpendicular plans of the facade and that of the ground: there would be no 'pillotis' nor any 'transparencies'. The man in charge of making those difficult choices, indeed the master planner of the whole design, was architect Agostinho Ricca Gonçalves17. The modern
movement was not new to him, though. Born in 1915, educated from 1932-37 in Architecture in the Beaux-Arts school and tradition of Marques da Silva's consulate, but professionally trained with the proto-moderns Rogério de Azevedo and Giovanni Muzio, he would embrace modern movement's 'purism' for only a short, intense period (1946-c.1949), designing in the (white)rationalist approach together with his older colleague, master and mentor, Viana de Lima, who would be, from 1951 to 1959 somewhat of a Portugal's ambassador to the CIAM18.
As an architect and artist his empathy, references and reverence are to be sought much to the north, in the Scandinavian 'new empiricists', and Alvar Aalto's, Hans Scharoun's and Ralph Erskine's sensualist/organicist poetics. He was also touched by the vigorous use of abstractly-ornamented ceramic tiles in architecture, of islamic connotations, something he was still to apply in his masterpiece, the MG building, in Julio Diniz street, in 1960-68.
15 Robert Auzelle had a functionalist training adhering enthusiastically to the "Charte d'Athènes,
véritable catéchisme de l'urbanisme progressiste [qui] doit beaucoup aux idées de le Corbusier [et qui] réclame des constructions en hauteur, éloignées l'une de l'autre, isolées dans la verdure et la lumière". in HAROUEL,Jean-Louis, Histoire de L'Urbanisme, 3rd Ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990 [1981]. pp. 98-100.
16 "Les tours et les barres sons le corollaire du théorème hygiéniste [moderniste]" in
HAROUEL,Jean-Louis, Histoire de L'Urbanisme, 3rd Ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990 [1981]. pp. 98-100.
17 On Agostinho Ricca see: GONÇALVES, Agostinho Ricca, Agostinho Ricca, Projectos e obras de
1948 a 1995. Porto: Associação dos Arquitectos Portugueses / Ordem dos Arquitectos, Secção Regional Norte, 2001; GONÇALVES, José Fernando, Agostinho Ricca. Vila do Conde: Verso da História, Col. Arquitectos Portugueses - série 2, 2013.
18 On Alfredo Viana de Lima see: SANTOS, Carlos Oliveira, O Nosso Niemeyer. Porto: Campo das
Letras Editores, 2001. SECCA, Amândio Fernandes (coord.), Viana de Lima, arquitecto, 1913- 1991. Porto: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian e Árvore - Centro de Actividades Artísticas, 1996.
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But not here: the ZRB, [or Zona Residencial da Boavista]19 was much more
'banal', sometimes 'dry' or even 'blunt', drawing on his field-trips to the strict European North, paid for by the Society, where the formal simplicity of Bakema- Van der Der Broek's Rotterdam LijnBaan, of 1953 and many 'anonymous' belgian, dutch and german post-war city centres caught his eye, even taking him, a non-german speaker, to subscribe to german magazines to keep in touch with the developments of those architectural models and ambiances20.
After several tentative designs the plan settled on a dilated triangle where the middle core would be occupied by a big public garden functioning as a visual and conceptual powerful aggregator. A big massive wall, crowned by a taller building, the Tower, was to be set against the VCI, acting like the backdrop of a formal composition and separating noise from the quietness of the garden. Opposite the garden and the Wall, there was to be a much lower building- continuum described in the cited publicity brochure as a 'commercial, recreational and cultural unit with all of the ground floor occupied by shops, and protected from the street by a lengthy 'portico' where the inhabitants of the Great Park will have a representation of Porto's finest commerce'. This lower building designated by the builders as 'the Recreational Center' certainly is the pearl of the whole and it constitutes a novelty of sorts in Portuguese architecture of the period. Other than the shops it was to house nothing less than two swimming pools, one of them on open air with esplanades and parterres of topographical variety, ‘tennis and badmington courts being also considered’ a restaurant and a ‘dancing’. Finally there was to be a Cinema 'that might as well function as a Concert and Exhibitions Hall'.
Closing the composition, in the frontier with the outer-city there was to be a church and a nursery school. This was enough for the advertisement brochure to state flamboyantly that ‘this simple description suffices to emphasise that,
19 The ZRB, standing for Zona Residencial da Boavista is the designation that we find labelling the
technical drawings coordinated by Ricca during the planning of the William Graham operation, therefore not following the more market-oriented designation of "Residential Park" used by the publicity brochures that were later to be distributed by the builder to prospective clients. However in his resumé, written much later by Ricca himself, "Boavista Residential Park" is the designation he uses.
20 The subscription of German and Swiss architectural magazines by a non-german speaker is a
fact amusedly mentioned by his daughter, and former collaborator, architect Helena Ricca in her conversations with the author of this paper. Of course, the Swiss magazines were at least bilingual, featuring articles in german and french.
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planned as a grandiose whole and executed to the tune of the best that you are ever to find in Europe, the Great Boavista Residential Park will be the most valuable and most sought for living centre in Porto’.21
The ZRB Files
So, what about the 200-plus photographs by 'Fotografia Comercial Teófilo Rego' found inside a box labeled ‘Sociedade de Construções William Graham’? What is its content? What do this photographs represent and what story do they tell? Skimming through the half-a-million photos that Rego's professional toil has produced is something disconcerting, but archivist Graça Barradas together with the FAMEP team of researchers painstakingly managed to do just that. In the end 5000 photos related, directly or contextually, to architecture. The team was thus able to establish, based on the archival 'principle of provenance' an information system presenting two self-explanatory sections, 'personal' and 'commercial'. Belonging to the later, the 'William Grahams' box, presented an undifferentiated blend of images, some of them unexpected: from photos of dusty land... to photos of candlesticks, and what seemed like an XVIII century servant and a diner table feast, the variety seemed both daunting and surreal. But images are produced in contexts and commercial photograph more so. Patterns of similitude have to be hunted for, establishing series of information production; 'tribes', 'clans' and 'families' must be identified. Chronologies both external (inter-series) or internal to the series must be attempted.
Setting apart all architectural works built by the Society but not related to the 'Boavista Residential Park' we end up with what we may call the ZRB files. First we should pay attention to their 'natural enclosures': envelopes sent to clients have destinations and date-stamps, they may reveal professional social networks, hierarchies of command and accountability, clarify purposes and give testimony to methods they used. Invoices reveal addresses, designations and flows of capital. Then we should focus on the signifier: films and prints, in the
21 See Brochura de Publicitária "Grande Parque Residencial da Boavista - Propriedade Horizontal -
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hands of an expert on photography forensics may help confirming dating of specimens, due to maker, support technology or ageing. We then have to 'lock our senses' on the subjects at hand. An architectural and building endeavour like this has many 'phases' — and architectural design phases try out different 'variants'. By establishing a relative chronology it is then possible to make sense of the plurality of different types of objects represented.
For photography may seem banal, even repetitive, but it answers purposes, it always houses choice or a 'raison-d'être'. As such, it was possible to identify photos of pre-design land survey, concept-models at different phases of project development,, photos that act as feed-back to sponsors and shareholders as proof of delivery on the money and finally photos to sustain material for various types of publication: photos made just to generate photolithographic plates, photos for marketing brochures or catalogues of appartment's typologies, for advertising leaflets on the Hotel (eventually built) and its facilities: swimming pools, gyms, snack-bars and lounges.
Probably the most interesting of the ZRB files are the UPHOs, or Unidentifyed Photographic Objects: some photos are just reproductions of other photos previously published in magazines. Some of them are actually images of foreign advertisements, like frames, full of frozen life, taken from a movie: they are preparatory 'clichés', collected to serve as models to the Society's own propagandistic devices: amongst the ZRB files there are this strange snapshots of interiors, 'apartment landscapes', 'still lifes' for marketing. In spite of the fact that the buildings date from the late 60s and early 70s, we are faced with an imaginary that is past-oriented, with knight armours and pictures of sailing yachts on the walls, old lamps and older armchairs: after the 1974 April Revolution with its forced occupations of rural estates, mansions and houses by marxist-lead populations, targeting affluent clients meant convincing them that living in a (Post CIAM) semi-closed Neighbourhood Unit, in apartments instead of houses, was the modern equivalent of living in a pre-modern Castle, thus catering to their real or imaginary ambitions or representations of nobility and social status. Hence the photos of silver candlesticks, or of XVIII century diner feasts… They are props for a theatre of aristocratic domesticity. In the permanent acid-base chemical reaction that is the interaction between the
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corruptive power of Time and the persistence of Matter — and people and