Pedro Duarte Bento

Post-Doc independent researcher, Lisbon, Portugal
pedroduartebento@gmail.com

Architectural Counterfeit — The art of Bad Copying

Following Quatremère de Quincy’s entry “TYPE” in his 1825 Encyclopédie Méthodique, the typological discussion became centred in the binomial Type-and-Model. This is, in the notion of how several artefacts (models) could derive from one single source (type). In a direct correlation with the scientific developments in classification and categorisation, the term populated the 19th century up to the beginnings of the Modern Movement, in which prototype and typology became preferable explorations in the architectural discourse. By the 1960s, the axiom was recovered, receiving new meanings from urban studies focused on city morphology, while understanding its distinctive capacities as an a priori concept versus an a posteriori matrix.
Through the Type-and-Model framework for a comparative and qualitative analysis, the present paper will explore how specific production from referential architects can generate a series of surrogate examples —in form, symbol, or both. More precisely, it will look at the Portuguese case of Eduardo Souto de Moura and the vast array of houses designed by a diversity of agents, such as architects, engineers and drafters, who draw inspiration from his neo-plastic language. Lacking, at different levels, his ethical, theoretical and technical commitment, the results reveal a continuous presence of flawed soutonian-like volumes. In a deeper level of observation, a precise type —in both of its manifestations a priori and a posteriori— is common as the origin of such models, all different between themselves but not distinctive enough to be considered a derivation from something else. Satirically known as “microwave ovens in the landscape,” these houses can be defined by construction incoherence, hybrid aesthetics and cliché elements. As an imitation, the soutonian like house seems to be more than a poor copy. Becomes a representational artefact for an emerging class looking to be part of a new, modern language and lifestyle. From suburban areas to the hinterland, an architecture of counterfeit is evident throughout the territory — and one of bad copying.

Keywords: architectural counterfeit; type-and-model; representational artefact; Souto de Moura.