Themes

In the 20th century, coastal architecture developed hand in hand with the radical transformation of industry, the popularisation of tourism and the emergence of complex financial systems.

As WG Sebald wrote in The Rings of Saturn (1995), coastal landscapes bear witness to layers of historical and economic change. The coastal towns he mentioned were going through a period of decadence, with the vestiges of formerly prosperous industries being abandoned. The evolution of coastal architecture throughout the 20th century reflected these profound social, industrial and financial transformations.

More recently and, at times, excessively, we’ve witnessed the consequences of all these transformations. In areas where once decadent ports or polluted industrial lands existed, later financially ambitious projects emerged, such as on the banks of the rivers of large coastal cities. These projects transformed constructed landscapes into palimpsests, revealing the coexistence of elements from the past with contemporary projects, as well as the history of the territory itself.

This session will host presentations on these transformation processes, focusing on the relationship between industrial decline, urban regeneration and the integration of new technologies into changing coastal landscapes. It also invites diverse methodological approaches to architectural history, from poetic explorations of Sebaldian narratives to interdisciplinary frameworks that embrace social and economic histories.

Keywords: industry, tourism, travel, coastline, architecture of the Modern Movement

Architecture, read as a whole and on a territorial scale, configures the urban and rural landscape, understood as an inhabited, integral and continuous reality. Urban planning and spatial planning, through their specific tools, plans and zoning, have served as intervention and project mechanisms that have operated at higher scales of action in the territory with a view to their formalisation, with the principles of Modernity set out in the Charter of Athens, which inspired the various Iberian territorial legislations.

This reading, which broadens the focus beyond the architectural object and contextualises it, understanding it as part of a joint urban and territorial project, is especially relevant on the coastline. The papers in this theme will deal with the architectural objects and their additions that took on new meaning by integrating into a large-scale, territorial vision, in continuity with the landscape and super-imposed on the environment in which they were located.

Keywords: territory, urban development, landscape, coastline, architecture of the Modern Movement

When holidays became popular in the 20th century, the sea combined its utilitarian dimension with elements of contemplation and experiential pleasure, turning the coast into a privileged territory for the leisure culture that was emerging at that time.

This shift in perspective and the consequent intensification of the human colonisation of the seafronts were produced simultaneously with the affirmation of the Modern Movement, revealing itself in ideological, urbanistic and architectural terms as a fertile and unexplored testing ground. The design of seafront promenades on an urban scale proved to be a moment of particular architectural condensation, defining itself as a space for the representation of the city and a stage for social exhibition.

Strongly attractive for numerous activities (such as yacht clubs, hotels, sanatoriums, villas, restaurants and cafés, swimming pools, scenic viewpoints, etc.), the discovery of the sea highlighted the international programme of the modern project.

Within the framework of the seafront, the papers on this theme will address creation and spatial revision of the multiple architectures that are common to it.

Keywords: sport, leisure, recreation, promenade, architecture of the Modern Movement

The maritime architecture of the modern movement clearly reflects the semantic landmarks of these buildings, overflowing their abstract and ahistorical nature. Some of these sources of new meanings are represented by the machine as an aesthetic referent, especially the new ocean liners; the popular architecture of the Mediterranean coast, with its flat roofs and white volumes, and the presence of the marine horizon, underlying the horizontal composition and encouraging the use of glazed surfaces to incorporate its presence into the built space.

In this approach to the form and meaning of the maritime architectures of modernity, we can recognise a dialectical opposition between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic through a series of compositional features that link orthodox modernity with classical tradition (and, therefore, Mediterranean), while modern transgressions and heterodoxies often have Atlantic roots. The papers on this theme should cater to a range of compositional dualities such as flat roof/sloping roof, light/heavy, smooth/rough, support/wall, abstract/figurative, etc., manifestations of this dialectical opposition, which is particularly evident in modern maritime architecture.

Keywords: Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, Genius Loci, coastline, architecture of the Modern Movement