The Architecture of Need: Community Facilities in Portugal 1945-1985 looks at the commission, design and production processes of essential local community civic and farmingfacilities in Portugal between the end of WWII and accession to the European Community. These buildings, mostly architect-designed, are part of our daily lives and testify toarchitecture’s attempts at social relevance, as material bonds between creators and users of the built environment; but they have been largely ignored by the dominant culture ofarchitecture, with its metropolitan-, art-historical-slanted approach. Now that dwindling resources must be used rationally and communities large and small need to build up theirresilience in a sustainable way, a novel, comprehensive understanding of these facilities, the agents, concepts, discourses and strategies behind them and their architecturaldefinition is paramount. This is an academic project designed to retrieve the long-lost DNA of everyday public-use and farming facilities in Portugal in order both to advance theculture of architecture and to empower local communities to knowingly reuse, transform, repurpose, maintain or eliminate critical pieces of their architecture of proximity.Building on career-long efforts by the team, this project moves away from the architecture of auteurs and artistic canons to discuss agents, pragmatic responses and service, incontexts where basic needs are met by works seen as mundane, the product of purportedly unremarkable processes. It investigates how unsung architecture, relevant for laypeopleand architects in the past, might be so again in the future, by looking at where it was most directly called to address need: in essential civic and farming facilities erected in non-metropolitan areas of Portugal. These include buildings for health care (medical centres, nursing homes); general public services (parish and town halls, market halls, public spaces);social support (adult and child care, community centres, t...

The main challenge of this Cost Action is to create a transnational network that gathers European researchers carrying studies on Middle-Class Mass Housing (MCMH) built in Europe since the 1950s. This network will allow the development new scientific approaches by discussing, testing and assessing case studies and their different methodologies and perspectives. MCMH has been generally underestimated in urban and architectural studies and there is still a lack of comparative analysis and global perspectives. The number of transnational publications and scientific meetings has also been scarce. By crossing different approaches focus on Architecture, Urbanism, Planning, Public Policies, History, Sociology new concepts and methodologies will arise. Therefore, the Action aims to produce a wider understanding of MCMH sprawl, deepening on-going researches and focusing on the existing case studies. The current methodologies, surveys, catalogue and contextualization allow an initial mapping of relevant case studies, their diverse degrees of resilience and how they have been adapted to current (urban and social) conditions. It is intended to develop the knowledge of the interaction between spatial forms, behaviours and satisfaction and to combine methodologies of architectural and social analyses. The Action will be developed by three Working Groups, coordinated by a Core Group: Documenting the MCMH; Development of a specific set of (new) concepts for MCMH analyses; Leverage contemporary architecture interventions and Public Policies. In the Action will be involved researchers related to Mass Housing, MCMH Architecture and Urbanism, Planning and Public Policies, Sociological studies, Architecture History and Modern Heritage.

The goal of the project is to carry out a compared analysis of Middle Class Mass Housing (MCMH) in Europe, Africa and Asia, introducing new case studies to deepen the existing research, made with successfully tested methodologies: survey, catalogue and contextualization of housing complexes built between the 1950s and the 1980s in Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Angola and China. It is intended to identify the existing housing and urban models and to map the changes after 50 years of use in order to understand how they have adapted to current (urban and social) conditions, and to support future actions. The case studies are located in the peripheries of Milan, Antwerp, Lisbon, Luanda and Macao, in areas that they helped to consolidate, and were selected by: 1) scale; 2) number of inhabitants; 3) accessibility; 4) urban and architectural quality. Based on on-going national studies, a cross-reading that reflects the expansion of cities in the context of demographic growth after WWII is proposed. The impact of residential models developed by architects in European contexts will be analysed, and also their transposition to territories formerly under colonial rule. The studies that analyse the transcontinental housing panorama under an architectural and sociological perspective are confined to some regional cases, not assuring a more global vision that includes: 1) the historical description of the physical evolution of the dwelling, the building and the neighbourhood; 2) the survey and analysis of their inhabitants' profile. We want to assess the resilience of these complexes, including testing and proposing ways to prolong its life by updating the functional organization of the apartments, by renewing the infrastructures and building systems and by outlining the profile of its residents. Special attention will be given to the way of promotion (public or private) and its effect on the profile of the current inhabitants (pioneer, recent, immigrant). The neighbourhoods are char...