High standards for women: Architectural education as a pathway to resilient work in former Portuguese Africa

Abstract

Although there is still little literature that crosses colonial and post-colonial studies with gender studies, it is increasing. Concerning Portuguese Africa, if we go back to the biographical origins of the first women authors, in the 1950s, investigation should include their training path, a decade earlier, as young adults and girls, in order to be completely understandable. The metropoles of the old colonial Empires were protagonists in this framework. For women to become architects – as self-employed, technicians working for the Public Works departments or cooperants with the reconstruction of the new independent nations –, they had to attend architecture courses in the available global north schools. In Portugal, the old beaux-arts tradition led, in the 1960s, to a myriad of political and aesthetic trends other than concrete propositions for the outer world and its specificities. Furthermore, north and south of the country would favour different aspects of the same one-nation-oriented official syllabi; and if the capital, Lisbon, graduated more students per year – and thus more women – some of these students would migrate to the country’s second city, Porto, and its (Superior) School of Fine Arts (E(S)BAP), later Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP). Today we are able not only to trace the existing women and girls students from this northern school, their names and most important works, but may go back to their original motivations and their first accomplishments in the perspective of their academic records and school works archives. We specifically look into two women architects that serve as case studies for our arguments: Carlota Quintanilha (EBAP, 1953) and Alda Tavares (ESBAP 1971/74). This paper will be structured in three parts that accompany this line of though: firstly, it will gather the most pertinent information known about these women (a resumed state of the art); secondly, it will list all the data attained for this particular investigation; thirdly, it will validate the hypothesis of the two women pointed out that graduated in Porto School having had a resilient work in Portuguese colonial Africa.