Cassiano Branco, Lisbon’s Art Deco dissenter, dies: 24 April 1970

Cassiano Viriato Branco died at about two in the afternoon on Friday 24 April 1970, in the Lisbon parish of São Mamede. He lived there in a ground-floor flat at number 7 Travessa da Fábrica das Sedas. He was 72 and a widower. The cause written in the civil register was sclerosis of the heart muscle and an infarct: a heart attack.1 source1 source

The death was registered at a quarter past nine the next morning at Lisbon’s Third Civil Registry Office, and the entry noted that he would be buried in the Alto de São João cemetery. It named his parents as Cassiano José Branco and Maria da Assunção Viriato Branco, and his birthplace as the parish of São José. He had been born there in 1897, at number 51 Rua do Telhal, close to the Avenida da Liberdade.2 sources2 sources

The dictatorship he opposed outlived him by four years and a day: it fell on 25 April 1974. In 1976 the French magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui gave him a place in a special issue on the new Portugal and called him a gênant, or “inconvenient”, architect, for his politics and for his buildings.1 source1 source

The Estado Novo, or New State, was the authoritarian regime led by António de Oliveira Salazar. Its constitution was promulgated in 1933 and it lasted until the revolution of 1974. In the 1930s it kept a tight grip on public finances. Pinto links the economic and political stability that followed to a boom in cinemas and in blocks of flats built by private investors for a new Lisbon bourgeoisie.1 source1 source

Branco belonged to the first generation of modern architects to work under the regime. In 1976 the historian José-Augusto França placed him, Cristino da Silva, Pardal Monteiro and Cottinelli Telmo, all born in 1896 or 1897, among the pioneers of Portuguese modernity. They replaced the “neo-romantic” revival styles of the early century, which imitated the buildings of the past, with a new architectural language.1 source1 source

They had new materials. Reinforced concrete allowed cantilevered slabs, floors that jut out with no support beneath, and Portugal’s ceramics factories supplied tiles, bricks and sanitary porcelain. A Concrete Code arrived in 1935, and in the middle of the decade the building of flats to rent boomed.1 source1 source

The Avenida da Liberdade, Lisbon’s great boulevard, had opened about 15 years before Branco was born, to a plan by the engineer Ressano Garcia. He watched it fill up as a boy, and it became, in Pinto’s words, “the main stage for expressing his own visions of modernity”.1 source1 source

His first building there, in 1928, two years after he finished his degree, was a two-storey concrete garage for storing and selling cars. Two grooved pilasters, flat columns set into the wall, framed its façade and were meant to evoke flaming torches. In 1933 he added a terrace kiosk for the Café Palladium: a single concrete column held up a raised floor above the bar, with a view along the Avenida, and on top a neon sign advertised Martini vermouth under a comic pig. Both have been demolished.1 source1 source

The bigger prize was the Éden, a theatre on Praça dos Restauradores, at the foot of the Avenida, owned by the industrial group Companhia União Fabril. From 1930 Branco worked on turning it into a large cinema for sound films. His last proposal put five tall bow windows, which project from the wall, and two steel-framed boxes of light like lanterns on the façade. Then his contract was terminated, and the architect Carlos Dias finished the job.2 sources2 sources

Pinto dates the opening of the new hall to 1937; Time Out Lisboa gives 1935. Branco’s main structure survived, and so did his entrance lobby under the projection room, where overlapping staircases led to the different parts of the house like a film set. The Éden closed in January 1989, and the building is now a hotel.2 sources2 sources

Branco designed the Hotel Vitória, at number 170 Avenida da Liberdade, in 1934 and 1935. It was drawn first as a residential building but opened as a hotel, on 1 July 1936. Only part of the design was built: the full scheme would have filled the empty plot between it and the neighbouring Hotel Liz, and several plans to finish it in the 1940s and 1950s came to nothing.3 sources3 sources

The façade is asymmetric. Horizontal bands of cantilevered floors end at the corner in round balconies stacked one above the other, faced in pink marble and trimmed with stainless steel. A concave top floor and a pergola, an open frame of beams, finish the roof. In the late 1930s the photographer Domingos Alvão used one of those balconies as a viewing platform for a picture of the boulevard below.2 sources2 sources

Inside, the rooms were furnished from the Grandes Armazéns Nascimento department store in Porto. During the Second World War, when Portugal was neutral, so many Germans stayed there that the Allies treated the hotel with suspicion, and it gained a reputation as a haunt of German spies.2 sources2 sources

The hotel closed in the 1960s, and by the revolution of 1974 the building had stood empty for several years. A hotel company tried to revive it and failed. Since 1976 it has housed the Portuguese Communist Party, as the Centro de Trabalho Vitória.2 sources2 sources

Most of his work in these years was less visible. He designed blocks of rented flats for private investors across Lisbon. One of the first, in 1932, was at number 3 Rua Almeida Brandão: four storeys with two flats on each floor. He treated each façade as scenery to be seen in movement, as in a cinema. His bathrooms, kitchens and ventilation were far better than most Lisboetas had.1 source1 source

Pinto counts the building at number 27 Avenida Defensores de Chaves, designed in 1937, as his masterpiece among the flats, with an undulating Art Deco façade of cantilevered volumes. Some of the plans from this period went to the city council over the signatures of the engineers he worked with, as at number 46 Avenida Álvares Cabral and number 7 Rua Nova de São Mamede, both designed in 1936 and 1937.1 source1 source

Tourism opened another line of work. In 1930 Branco drew an urban plan for Costa da Caparica, on the Atlantic coast south of Lisbon, then a poor fishing village, with hotels, casinos, cinemas, theatres and sports grounds for the capital’s new bourgeoisie.1 source1 source

Fernando Bissaya Barreto, born in 1886, was a surgeon and professor at the Coimbra medical school who had presided over the district council of Coimbra since 1927. He was also an administrator of the Luso water company, and in 1938 Branco designed the Grande Hotel das Termas do Luso for it, an L-shaped building around a pool fed by the spring, which opened in 1940.2 sources2 sources

Barreto’s conservative views pushed Branco to combine tradition with modernity. That suited the mood of 1940, when the regime celebrated 800 years since the founding of the nation and 300 since the restoration of independence with the Portuguese World Exhibition in Lisbon. Branco designed the surroundings of its Colonial Garden, but most of his attention went to Coimbra.1 source1 source

There Barreto wanted a park where children could see Portugal’s houses and monuments at their own scale. Portugal dos Pequenitos opened on 8 June 1940 as an extension of the Casa da Criança Rainha Santa Isabel, a nursery and kindergarten that still works on the site.1 source1 source

The park was built in three sections. The first, a village of regional houses, was finished in 1940. The second, completed in 1951, held pavilions for the colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, São Tomé and Cape Verde, and for Brazil, Madeira and the Azores, with a Coimbra pavilion that stitched together copies of the Santa Cruz church, the Old Cathedral, the bishop’s palace and the university tower. The third, with pavilions for Portugal’s regions, followed in 1961.1 source1 source

Pinto puts the partnership of architect and doctor at 28 years. He argues that the surveys Branco made for the copies taught him Portugal’s building heritage and changed how he thought, and that the park became a laboratory where he collaged fragments of monuments into strange new hybrids.1 source1 source

In Porto, a concert hall was planned on the site of the old Passos Manuel garden, where music and plays had been staged in the open air. The site’s owner, the Garantia insurance company, closed the old garden hall in 1938 and began to build. Proposals came from 1937 onwards from José Porto, from the Dutch architect Jan Wils, whose Amsterdam City Theatre Branco studied, and from Júlio de Brito, whose scheme was rejected. In 1939 Branco was asked to resolve the project, reusing parts that had already been built.3 sources3 sources

Pinto says Branco had been working on it since 1937 and signed his contract with the Garantia insurance company in 1939. He put a wide, round auditorium in the middle of the block and split the street front in two: a blank wall bearing Porto’s coat of arms with a tall vertical slab announcing the hall, and beside it a commercial building with horizontal strip windows.1 source1 source

Once again he fell out with his client. His contract was terminated during construction, and the neon lighting he had drawn for the façade was never installed. The sequence of porch, foyers and curved corridors that funnels crowds to their seats is still his. The Coliseu opened with a gala evening on 19 December 1941.2 sources2 sources

In 1995 the owners were close to selling the Coliseu to the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Porto protested, and an association of the Coliseu’s friends, the Associação Amigos do Coliseu, was formally set up on 17 November 1995. It bought the building on 2 August 1996 for 680,000 contos, or 680 million escudos, and still owns it.1 source1 source

Pinto writes that the discomfort Branco caused came from his personality and from his ideological opposition to the government. Twice he backed opposition candidates in presidential elections.1 source1 source

In 1949 he supported General Norton de Matos, who stood against the sitting president, Marshal Óscar Carmona, and withdrew days before the vote, saying his minimum political demands had not been met. In 1958 he backed Humberto Delgado, an air force general who had served the regime before breaking with it. The vote was held on 8 June 1958, and the official count gave Delgado 236,528 votes against 758,998 for Rear Admiral Américo Tomás.4 sources4 sources

His open support for Delgado cost him. In June 1958 he was detained by the PIDE, the political police that the regime had set up in 1945 to replace an earlier force. The sources used here do not say how long he was held.3 sources3 sources

From the 1940s his style changed. The new architecture of the period tried to absorb the forms of Portugal’s past, and Branco’s Lisbon buildings of those years have towers, pinnacles, gargoyles, pointed arches and showy balconies. Pinto describes the problem of joining tradition with modernity as a dilemma that had no clear solution.2 sources2 sources

The 1976 article in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, by Fernando Gomes da Silva, called him “an exception to the rule” and used photographs from the family’s archive. In 1986 the Portuguese Architects Association held an exhibition of his work, and in 1991 Lisbon City Council published a book about him, Cassiano Branco, uma obra para o futuro. The film director Edgar Pêra made a documentary, A Cidade de Cassiano, in 1992.1 source1 source

Paulo Tormenta Pinto, an architect and professor at ISCTE, a university in Lisbon, published his study Cassiano Branco 1897-1970 in 2015. It runs to 600 pages and analyses more than 50 works and projects.2 sources2 sources

In 2020, for the 50th anniversary of the architect’s death, the Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa, which holds his papers, ran a programme called Olhar Cassiano: a photography competition, an exhibition by Daniel Blaufuks, a mural by the artist HUARIU at the corner of Avenida Almirante Reis and Rua do Desterro, less than a kilometre from his birthplace, and a colloquium at the Gulbenkian Foundation on 3 November. The competition’s prizes were to be handed out at another of his buildings, the Hotel Britania on Rua Rodrigues Sampaio, near the Avenida.1 source1 source