The Assembly of the Republic as a possible testing ground of the relations between space and power

Image Credits: Paulo Catrica. Courtesy of the artist.

Bento de Spinoza, in his Political Treatise, employs the Roman sense of city (civitas) to refer to a set of citizens inhabiting the same place (“enjoy the comforts”) and submits to the same laws, expression of the sovereign power. (3) Interestingly, in thinking about the city, Massimo Cacciari chooses to clarify the differences be- tween the Greek polis, which designated a specific ethnic group (the city‐state was always of the same ethnicity), and the dynamic concept of Roman civitas as a “con- fluence of different elements, of different traditions and languages” (4), the latter of which is especially present in what today we call the European city. “We, in fact, conceive the city as a place where people come together to accept and obey a law.” (5)

A century after Spinoza’s Political Treatise, Rosseau, in his Social Contract, curiously regrets that the sense of the city was disappearing “in modern times” (6), reminding us how “houses make the city (ville), but Citizens make the City (cité).” (7) This misperception, however, has allowed many architects to claim a political root for the city as an urban form – which they mean to refer to the Greek polis, from which the words politiké (politics in general) and politikós (with respect to the polis’ inhabitants). However, in the Greek polis, the bond lay with blood, and not law. Archaic meanings aside, our formulation seeks to take advantage of the ambiguity that has been built around the idea of a city in which it is not only the law that governs and unites its citizens, which defines its political being; but also the space and the shape of the buildings comprising it.

The building of the current Assembly of the Republic, seat of the Portuguese Parliament, is an excellent example, having been the set and stage to successive political systems. It interests us in ascertaining how these different political systems may have conditioned the building’s form (paying simultaneous attention to both its composition and architectural organisation, and to the appropriation and use of its spaces, whether of a functional or symbolic nature), the space that defines it and the space it itself defines in the city where it is inserted. The history accumulated on it, which crosses important social and political movements – from the constitutional monarchy to the full‐fledged conquest of freedom – and secular and contemporary architectural languages – from its plain style to its reinvented modernism –, stimulates an understanding that should not be limited to a succession of events; an understanding that seeks to define the very meaning of what the political space in our present is – although we are aware that the set of questions we intend to pose still reflects only a small part of this understanding. (8)

In a recent text, Jonas Staal, a Dutch artist, explains the relationship between form and ideology from the example of “democratic confederalism” or “stateless democracy” emerging in the Autonomous Region of Rojava after this Kurdish area separated itself from the Assad regime. For Staal, it is a question of thinking of a new form of parliament as a choreographic space where, instead of the traditional parliament, where the decisions of a governmental power are rehearsed (often according to scripts), there is a stateless democracy whose decisions come from the community’s collective participation. In a way, it is at this point that architecture is the expression of an ideology, by which we mean that both architecture and ideology are mutually founded and constructed (architecture becomes part of the process of collective participation, and a performative actor as well). When Rojava declared its autonomy from the Assad regime, the infrastructures of the old regime lost their form, which united them as expressions of that power. Exercising a stateless democracy deprived all governmental structures of meaning, as forms themselves metamorphosed to create suitable spaces for the community: the ancient monuments to Assad and his father became monuments to the martyrs and thinkers of the new revolution, military buildings became schools, municipal parliaments were occu- pied by communities and cooperatives. “Ideology changed the nature and meaning of form,” Staal writes. (9)

Working together with the Kurdish revolutionaries, Staal and his New World Summit organisation have created a new parliamentary building which, in its form, intends to express the ideological propositions of the new political system: self-governance, gender equality, right to self-defence and communal economy. Interestingly, the Rojava community wanted to bring into the form of their parliament the origins of democracy, which they identified with the Greek agora, as the place where politics was born (we should highlight their ignorance of the original sense of polis, given that the Rojava community attests to the diversity present in the region, simultaneously communicating in Assyrian, Arabic and Kurdish), and to assert parliament as communal space in itself. Staal and his organisation came up with a semi-spherical shape, in an attempt to shift the power of a centre and place all the assembly’s participants in an egalitarian position. They inscribed, in every element of their design, the different values in which the new political system is based. The expressions “confederalism,” “gender equality,” and “communalism” are written along the circular arcs in the three languages, while on the cover of the dome are hung various fragments of hand‐painted flags of the various organisations involved in the liberation process.

This recent example allows us to draw back to a dream born of the Liberal Revolution of 1820, from which the first Portuguese Constitution was created, in 1822 (an event whose pictorial allusion, by José Veloso Salgado, stands above the Portuguese Parliament), and to understand better how the form (understanding it
as Staal does, which also includes the choreography of the bodies and their actions, and iconography) reveals the ideas underlying a given political ideology, and how this interdependence can determine, in turn, the relationship between political power and the city.

We recognise some ideas that test our hypothesis in the building of the Assembly of the Republic, (10) starting with the foundation of the Monastery of São Bento da Saúde in 1598 – which, first of all, expresses religious power in sixteenth century Lisbon, whose proximity to the royal power was unquestionable; and territorial power as well. From the beginnings of the existence of monastic life, monasteries and convents were responsible for the organisation of the territory and, in the great cities, for the development of the urban fabric around them. It was of interest to the Benedictine friars to have a monastery near the centre of the city and, above all, the riverside frontage where many houses of the Nobility and various workshops and commercial activities were then located – unlike the first monastery built by the Order in Lisbon, minor in dimensions and in impact on the landscape, located in what became the neighbourhood of Estrela. “As the first Monastery that our Reformer built in Lisbon was too small, and difficult to access in winter as well as summer, the Religion commanded, for the sake of [public] peace, that another Monastery be built, nearer the City, for the better use of the people in the vicinity of the aforementioned road. It was begun in the year 1598, when Father Balthezar of Braga was Father General in his second triennium, with the project by the famous Architect Balthezar Aluares. (...) Whomsoever sees this Monastery finished, and perfect, from what we now judge of the design and of its principles, I very well believe would rank it among the most distinguished and greatest in majesty, of all those that exist in Spain.” (11)

The project was very clear in its territorial and architectural ambitions, which likewise translated themselves into a scale and form that were singular in the Iberian context. The original project by Balthazar Álvares – of which some depictions are known, made years later by one of the monks of the order – began with a square plan, whose scale we can imagine by the size of the existing main façade. It contained four cloisters and, in spite of the incomplete layout – only two of the cloisters were built, and part of the building that surrounds them on both sides –, the main body of the building became a reference in the landscape, thus determining a growing urbanisation in its proximity.This characteristic allows us to inquire about the very genesis of the metropolitan space (our present space), in which reference bodies or building-bodies (inherited from the urban space, of which the monastery was founder) transcend limits, “along the lines of its own movement,” (12) which suggests the rapid consolidation of built space and the conversion of the area of São Bento into an important centre of urban life – a conversion which was later reinforced by the transformation of the inactive monastery into Palácio das Cortes (Palace of the Cortes), after the decree of commission for ecclesiastical reform that extinguished the religious orders in 1833. This appropriation is part of the amendment and change of powers which cannot, however, be reduced to a functional reading, which has emphasised the dimensions of the buildings as being adequate to the necessary functions parliamentary life, namely for the installation of the Chamber of Peers and the Chamber of Deputies (at the time of its adaptation, the Constitution defined a bicameral system). The location of the extinct monastery, near the Palácio das Necessidades, where the royal family resided at that time; and the consolidation of the urban network – reinforced with the area’s conversion, after the 1755 earthquake, as an alternative to the Baixa –, certainly also weighed in the choosing of this place as a new centre of political power and expression of the values affirmed in the Constitution. These factors, however, seem circumstantial to us, when we foresee another possibility (precisely one that can give us an indica- tion of a Benedictine perspective on the relation between space and power).

In Filipe Folque’s 1882 topographical map of Lisbon, an indication of improvements or projects for various areas of the city is overlaid in red. This overlay especially reflects the desire to transform the Palace of Cortes into an urban centre, from which several avenues would be opened, including the Avenue of the Legislative Palace, which would link the Palace to the riverside front (a foreshadowing, which appeared in several projects, of what would later become the present Dom Carlos Avenue). At the end of the 19th century, the Palace of the Cortes was undoubtedly a centre of power in the city of Lisbon, or an assemblage: an assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously. (13) Assemblage, as conceived by Deleuze & Guattari, has two sides, one belonging to the abstract machine of desire, whose ultimate goal is the connection of different lines of flight and consequent creation of multiplicities or heterogeneous forms (“An assemblage is all the closer to the abstract machine the more lines without contour passing between things it has, and the more it enjoys a power of metamorphosis) (14) and another territorializing side, present, for example, in the state apparatus, in which the connections stop producing creative lines to form successive strata, losing the power of metamorphosis and falling into the established (the side that determined the need for an institutional facade, out of step with the architectural language of his time).

On the side of the abstract machine was definitely the architectural model of the Benedictine friars who, with the boldness of their territorial scale and their design, managed to transform the whole territory around them, to create a unique urban life (predecessor to the metropolitan space) which would last until the Estado Novo. This regime, an absolute form of state apparatus, finally eliminated the existence of a public space, reclaimed when another line of flight took on the mantle of political power (revolutions are always machinic assemblages whose origins lie in the abstract machine and which, due to the side of the assemblage directed towards the stratification, therefore imply a reterritorialization which is not always easy: the Portuguese Constitution of 1976 is an expression of this “schizophrenia,” as António Barreto revealed it). (15)

We can also establish a direct relationship with the successive political systems through the form and appropriation of the public space. Interestingly, when the Benedictine monastery was transformed into the Palace of the Cortes, and before we witness the annihilation of the public space by the Estado Novo, all demonstrations – whether of opposition, protest or celebration – were carried out and conducted as though transversely to the building’s main façade, precisely because of its topographic and urban condition through several interwoven paths with stairs, that crossed the accentuated slope next to the Palace. The Palace shared the city’s public space and stimulated urban life, further reinforced by the presence of the São Bento market, on the side facing the homonymous street. It did it almost anonymously, were it not for its symbolic character which had in the meanwhile begun to be asserted by the beautification works on the main façade.

During the Estado Novo, Cristino da Silva’s project eliminated any expression of urban life in the public space. It designed a “Protection Zone of the Palace of the National Assembly,” as the project was entitled, “in order to obtain a vast building of grandiose aspect designed to promote the Palace of National Assembly as much as possible,” (16) demolishing, even, the market of São Bento, which the architect considered unaesthetic. (17) Cristino da Silva’s project for public space uses architecture and its design as instruments of submission and control of the city’s political space. And the promotion of the Palace proved to be equal to the promotion of a historical monument, which, to some extent, seemed to be adequate for the death to which the Estado Novo consigned Parliament.

A similar end was reserved for the main façade of the old Benedictine monastery, which, according to many historians, was one of the best examples of the Portuguese plain architecture style. In the words of Raquel Henriques da Silva: “These monuments [referring to a group of works by Balthazar Álvares, including the monastery of São Bento] are major pieces of Portuguese architecture that, without dwelling on their significant stylistic diversity, define the essential of our Mannerism, also called, since Georges Kubler’ pioneering study, plain style [estilo chão]. To put it simply, it is characterized by an expressive appreciation of the building blocks, geometrized and sparsely decorated, by a unification of the internal spaces and, internally and externally, by an austere and subtle use of light as a plastic resource.” (18) This description could fit any contemporary work, so much so that many recognise the genesis of the identity of Portuguese architecture in the plain style. (19) As Raquel Henriques da Silva further points out, regarding the Monastery of São Bento: “The power of this architecture, dominated by an expressive horizontality, was fed by the edification’s mass, a kind of operative container in which the discrete elements of morphological enrichment stood out without imposition. Lisbon’s sifted or raw light would strike them with no depth, safeguarding, once again, that the fortress of the outer walls were the mark of the building’s character.” (20)

For this historian, however, in his plan to remodel the façade, Ventura Terra knew how to preserve the legacy of the Benedictine building through the neo-classical language, which simultaneously translated the monumentality and the exceptional character that the Constitutional Cortes intended for their building. Curiously, the plain style was determinant in the “city-making” of the cities of the Portuguese Empire, “of which the Brazilian historical cities are the most remarkable materialisation” (21) and, many years after the conclusion of the works of the main façade, such as Ventura Terra designed in the new building, designed by Fernando and Bernardo Távora, we find again this abstract and anonymous language of “city-making.” In the new building, we can identify the ideal of the design of the Pombaline quarter, of a democratic city, whose principle is the construction of an architectural language contrary to that of the monument. The new building is an integral part of the fabric to which it is formally joined, an evocation, even, of the piece of the city that the Benedictine friars fostered around the Palace – a piece where, of the many projects they presented to the Kingdom’s Ministry of Public Works, a group of buildings was put up according to the Pombaline model (shops on the ground floor and housing on the four upper floors), which still remains today. The new building’s architecture, democratic – indifferent to the power that erects it – and anonymous – because it belongs to the street of all – also allows for the Palace of São Bento to continue to assert itself as a monument. Its connection with the city, however, at the origin of political thought, certainly prevails.

Finally, we would like to briefly discuss Staal’s equivalence between form and ideology and recover part of Portugal’s political history through Jean-François Colson’s remodelling project and Ventura Terra’ project. In Colson’s plans, the relation between form and the ideology of the time is evident: the bicameral system corresponds to two amphitheatres, though with different dimensions (as the number of deputies was superior to the number of peers of the Kingdom), placed symmetrically in relation to the main axis of the plan by the old Church, now flanked on both sides by a set of stairs, choreographing, therefore, the movements themselves, now of the deputies, sometimes of the peers of the Kingdom (incidentally, this division from the movement of each of the Cortes’ parts had already been present in the adaptation of the old convent to Palace of the Cortes, in the works of the Intendence of Public Works and in Possidónio da Silva’s project). (22)(23) Of Colson’s project, only the Chamber of Peer (presently the Hall of the Senate) was built. It was inaugurated on 3 January 1867, and it was considered “A beautiful room, much more modern than the spirit which prevails in the institution, as recognised by most of its most illustrious members, who have long thought of carrying out a reform that would harmonise that body of state with the [current] tendencies.” (24) As the journalist of O Occidente has pointed out, there is in architecture the possibility of being not only an expression of a zeitgeist but, above all, an active political power capable of undertaking a mutual reform. In fact, the spatiality and the elements of composition of the Chamber of Peers endured in several political systems, which changed only its designation and the iconography on the wall behind the presidential gallery, as we will be able to see in the various photographs of the room’s respective appropriations.

A fire in the Chamber of Deputies in 1895 precipitated the consultation of Ventura Terra, which would win the competition launched by the Public Works Services Directorate for a new Chamber of Deputies and its dependencies, with a proposal that provided for the use of part of the preexisting structure, occupying the emptiness of one of the cloisters of the old monastery. The Hall of Sessions, inspired by the Sorbonne’s amphitheatre, and the Hall of Lost Steps next to it, an evocation of the Gare d’Orsay, were completed in January 1903 – although they only saw their first important ceremony on 29 April 1908, with the acclamation of King D. Manuel II. With a semi-circular layout and an amphitheatre arrangement, the room provided “One hundred and fifty seats for deputies, seven for the ministry, a rostrum for the presidency, a bench for the stenographers and a rostrum for the speakers. Special galleries for the royal family, for the diplomatic corps, for the families of the president, secretaries and deputies, and for the press. A reserved gallery for three hundred seats, and another one for the public with five hundred.” (25) Like the Chamber of Peers, the architectural qualities of the Hall of Sessions lasted throughout the various legislatures, with changes in the political system demonstrated through iconography and, above all, the appropriation of space by the bodies. During the Estado Novo, the five hundred seats will remain empty (with the exception of solemn ceremonies) and the bodies in their gestures detach themselves from the ties to the decision-making power, which during that time remains confined in the Office of the President of the Council. More expressive are the photographs after the revolution of April 25, 1974: The Hall of Sessions is buzzing, the streets are too small for the crowd, the public space is reborn! The true aim of the republic, to paraphrase Spinoza, is freedom. That of architecture, we would add, is to be a living space, it too expressing a freedom of appropriation, equality and community, to fulfil its political purpose.

Notes

1. Translation in English by the University of Adelaide, retrieved from https://ebooks.adelaide.edu. au/s/spinoza/benedict/political/ complete.html. Espinosa, Tratado Político. Lisboa: Temas e Debates, Círculo de Leitores, 2008, p. 93. Spinoza’s Tractatus Politucus, left unfinished by his death on 21 February 1677, was meant to clarify and update some of his assertions in the previous Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

2. Massimo Cacciari, A Cidade. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2010 [2004], pp. 9-10.

3. To Spinoza, political power is a feature of the nature of the human being who, faced with the impossibility of surviving in isolation, combines his individual potency with that of others in order to find a common power - “not because of an ‘unanimity of every individual will, or even most of them, but for gathering in itself enough strength to impose itself on all of them”; in dictatorships, this power lies in the hands of only “an individual capable of casting fear upon all others, who then obey him.” Diogo Pires Aurélio, “Potência e Direito, Introdução ao Tratado Político de Espinosa,” Op. Cit., p. 21.

4. Cacciari, Op. Cit., p. 14.

5. Idem, p. 24.

6. Translation in English by the University of Adelaide, retrieved from https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/ rousseau/jean_jacques/r864s/

7. Translation in English by the University of Adelaide, retrieved from https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/ rousseau/jean_jacques/r864s/. Note from translator Diogo Pires Aurélio to Spinoza’s Political Trea- tise, Op. Cit., p. 214.

8. The work, which Casa da Arquitectura aims to carry out in order to create an important database by bringing together projects from different institutions, will certainly open several lines of research in this field.

9. Jonas Staal, “Ideology = Form.” In e-flux journal, No. 69, January 2016.

10. These ideas were presented over four sections in the exhibition The House of Democracy: Between Space and Power.

11. Description of the Monastery of São Bento da Saúde by Friar Leão de São Tomás, in 1644. In Afonso, Simonetta Luz (coor.); Os Espaços do Parlamento: da Livraria das Necessidades ao Andar Nobre do Palácio das Cortes, 1821 – 1903. Lisboa: Assembleia da República, 2003, p. 103.

12. Massimo Cacciari describes how a hierarchy exists between buildings in metropolitan space, in which “the body of the building in reference is called to perform a definite task, and has specific qualities and properties. From this point of view, the metropolitan space does not differ substantially from the urban space - except for the fact that it transcends the old limits, throwing itself along the of its own movement,” Cacciari, Op. Cit., p. 46. Apropos, Cacciari recalls: “The evolution towards the metropolis was possible because the starting point of the European city was not the Greek polis, but the Roman civitas. Our idea of city is totally Roman, it is civitas mobilis augescens, a fundamental fact attested to by the urban transformation of political revolutions that have the city as centre,” Idem, p. 30.

13. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2: A Thousand Plateaus. London, New York: Continuum, translation by Brian Massumi, 2004 [1972] p. 25.

14. Idem, p. 564.

15. “In the absence of a democratic power, without authority, with a Public Administration and a divided and unstable Armed Forces, without proven legitimacy, without undeniable legality, it was this Constitution that preserved democracy. That created it. After a coup, the Constitution managed to strike a balance between its many diverse sources and emerging political forces. The political and legal con- struction of the Constitution was inspired by democracy, corporatism, communism, socialism, social democracy, Christian democracy, and the experiences of development dictatorships and Third World autocracies. Without forgetting the cooperative and self-management. It was, paradoxically, thanks to this mixture that the Constitution protected us from various despotic attempts lurking about. The text is an unbelievable tangle of defence mechanisms against dangers that, real or fictitious, all parties foresaw. It was about making it impossible to return to fascism and corporatism, to avoid communism, to protect the Republic against Sidonism, and to counteract the fancies of the MFA's military. It sought to avoid the pitfalls of parliamentary, formal and bourgeois democracy, thus giving rise to new powers (military or labour unions) that were able to override the rights and powers of citizens. It was hoped that it could eliminate or contain local and regional caciquismo, as well as the powers of the Church. An attempt was made to create a regime of advanced socialism and to establish all the new imaginable rights of cit- izens. The society without classes and the primacy of the collective over the individual were proclaimed. What was wanted was the creation of an eternal regime, with an untouchable Constitution, that is, whose main provisions would never be corrected, revoked or revised!” António Barreto, “Em Defesa de uma Constituição positiva e simples.” In Observador, 22 April 2015.

16. Cristino da Silva, “Memória Descritiva do Ante-Projecto da Zona de Protecção do Palácio da Assembleia Nacional,” Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Biblioteca de Arte (digital reading).

17. Idem, Ibidem.

18. Raquel Henriques da Silva, “A Casa de S. Bento na Cidade.” In Simonetta Luz Afonso, Op. Cit., p. 78.

19. The description of the plain style by Raquel Henriques da Silva has echoes in Alexandre Alves Costa’s following description of Portuguese architecture, and specifically on how we have tried to adapt international models. Alves Costa’s description also has the particularity of emphasising the values that could be found in the Benedictine monastery, and which were responsible for his second life. “Portuguese architecture is mainly construction, a supporting space for action. It is refined through simplification, communicated first and foremost by a decoration that does not interfere with structural values; and, even when it aspires to a more emotive and dynamic space, as in the Baroque, it is contained within a volumetry that dare not break with simplicity of a geometry of pure volumes. By necessity of affirmation, of dominion or territorial characteristic, it works the scale and it is mainly in the dimension and the implantation that assumes, as object in the constructed or natural landscape, its most expressive formal values,” Alexandre Alves Costa, Introdução ao Estudo da História da Arquitectura Portuguesa. Porto: Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto, 1995, pp. 31-32.

20. Idem, p. 79.

21. Idem, p. 78.

22. See, for example, José-Augusto França, O Palácio de S. Bento. Lisboa: Assembleia da República, 1999, p. 67.

23. For more details on Colson’s project, see Simonetta Luz Afonso and Cátia Mourão, “Os Espaços do Parlamento: Da Livraria das Necessidades ao Andar Nobre do Palácio das Cortes,” Op. Cit., pp. 39-44.

24. O Occidente (Vol. I, No. 2, 15 de Janeiro de 1878) apud Simonetta Luz Afonso and Cátia Mourão, Idem, p. 47.

25. Idem, p. 63.

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