Our present is our future past: rethinking heritage through our contemporary memory

Using Popular and Vernacular Architecture in the Portuguese region of Estremadura as a Case Study, the proposed poster will try to re-evaluate today’s boundaries of the concept Heritage (in time, space and models) through the evaluation of the rural housing types that over the years have defined the context’s Landscape. When observing the study area, we conclude that the Models and Types qualified before as portrayers of the region’s identity have now changed and/or disappeared, due to the time lapse between its previous researches and nowadays: in fact it was in the early 1960s that a group of Portuguese architects created a research project in order to collect the Portuguese regions architectural types in danger of disappearing, which resulted in a book: “Popular Architecture in Portugal”. They were heavily influenced by all the attention devoted at that time to “architecture without architects” by numerous authors, like Paul Oliver or Bernard Rudofsky, which focused on a Type of Architecture deeply embedded in local traditions and materials, without outer influences that corrupted one’s identity (something that, according to them, was bound to happen eventually). So, the survey lead in Portugal focused mainly in rural types built with “local materials and that would express a region’s cultural and tectonic background”, but ignoring models, also rural and also “without architects” being built at that precise time (the 1950s/60s), because these where considered an “intolerable miscegenation of architecture” (as they carried signs of different cultures, rural and erudite, no longer being “pure” examples of vernacular architecture). However, those “pure” vernacular models have disappeared (as predicted), and now our rural landscape is composed by the “androgynous” models from the 1960’s, once considered “intolerable”. We thus conclude that, according to those who said it, we no longer have vernacular or popular heritage in our rural landscape. But are these houses really something to look upon with despise? Being born under the influence of several cultures, superimposing different elements over one’s Model is something to ignore as a relevant historic and architectural heritage? After all, it’s the Past that our present generation was born into, has “we” no longer have almost any memory of an “alternative past”. And if we look around to what is being build nowadays, we have to take into account that these new houses and the landscape they compose (our Present) will be the Past of our future generations. So, rather the evaluate today’s “architecture without architects” (since in Portugal only a few of these rural houses are truly designed by them), it is time to review some concepts that we have taken for granted over the years: the evolving characteristics of our society, for starters, have changed our legacy, and so the way we understand the very notion of Heritage must be reviewed: is it a matter of temporal distance, of number of existing models (defining – or not – a landscape), of “purity”? Only after we can portray today’s rural landscape according to those principles, re-evaluating their meaning in our identity: was there a loss, from the 1960’s till nowadays? Or a gain, with added models and features? If there was a loss, was something that could be prevented? If not, is today’s heritage in danger according to what is being built today? These questions, than can be translated into a process that evolves from social awareness (in a way that we all can evaluate the meaning of our landscape) to an efficient policy regarding heritage protection (preserving valuable features and/or demising distressing elements in the landscape), are therefore the main purpose of the case study to be presented, a case study that actually consists in three different ones: “their past” (in the 1900-1960’s), “our past” (1960- 2000’s) and “our future past” (2000 and on)