Modernidades múltiplas na arquitectura portuguesa dos anos 1940

The Batalha cinema in Porto, designed by the architect Artur Andrade (1913-2005), is considered by architectural historians as a paradigmatic work of the Modern Movement in Portugal. Opened in 1947 after the end of the Second World War and in the context of a politically repressive dictatorship, the building comprises solutions characterised by their surprising formal audacity, showing that Portuguese architects were perfectly up to date in their mastery of the codes of the international Modern Movement. Its modernity is apparent above all in the use of new materials and new techniques and has its symbolic corollary in the immense glazed curve of its façade, offering an emblematic public image of visual power that is as surprising as it is dynamic. Associated with this modern technique, the cinema also incorporates a decorative grammar infused with the Art Deco values, to be seen in the hierarchical composition and in the stylistic choices of an ornamental nature. The plastic and playful potential of noble materials is underlined by the detailed design of the furnishings, the flooring and in a more apparent way, in the treatment of surfaces where various plastic interventions compose an exuberant scenography, realising the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) that the avant-gardes advocated, and that the critical revision of the Modern Movement proposed to recover. The tendency to take great care in design and to pay attention to the slightest detail came from the teaching methods used in the Beaux-Arts school of Paris and applied in the fine arts schools of Portugal, where Artur Andrade was trained. The Batalha is thus an incarnation of the coexistence between, on the one hand, the desire to apply the modern lessons to which Portuguese architects subscribed and, on the other, the persistence of academic values in their training. Based then on this example of the Batalha cinema, this article is a reflexion about the way Art Deco aesthetics impregnated the earliest works of the Modern Movement, but with local variations. The aim is to contribute to an enlargement of the discussion about the reception of modernism in peripheral countries.