To turn the witchcraft against the wizard, which is much more useful than creating one’s own witchcrafts.” This was how Victor Palla, a Lisbon-based architect, described in 1949 his (post-war) generation’s strategy to address concerns with built environment traditions in conservative, dictatorship-led Portugal: tradition’s strength should be acknowledged, and competent designers would “derive from it a means of defence for modern architecture”. Such was the actual importance of tradition.

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