Women Architects in Portugal: Working in Colonial Africa before the Carnation Revolution (1950–1974)

Abstract

How did women architects shape a modern world in the late period of Portuguese colonial Africa, just before the Carnation Revolution? The specific role of women in Portugal working in colonial African architectural culture has now started to be addressed by Portuguese and Lusophone-African historiography. During the 1950s, the presence of women in the metropolitan schools of architecture was reduced. Of those who could graduate, few actually worked as architects. Most were absorbed by the commonly feminine roles, resulting from marriage and from the ideal of family promoted by the Estado Novo dictatorship. To the ones that risked prosecution for working outside the family, the option of jobs associated with the feminine universe, such as teaching, was privileged. Among those who were emancipated from this pattern, the majority worked in familiar partnerships, regarded as an extension of marriage. The women architects that follow the husbands in their African emigration often ended up having the opportunities to work in their professional field partly due to the lack of qualified technicians, and to the high demand of commissions. This paper not only seeks to outline a perspective on these women, but also tries to understand the context of their work by presenting two case-studies in the late in the late period of Portuguese Colonisation: Maria Carlota Quintanilha and Maria Emilia Caria.

1. Pioneering Women Architects in Africa

Maria Carlota Quintanilha (1923–2015) and Maria Emília Caria (1926–2000) were trained as architects in Portugal during the Estado Novo regime (1928/1933–1974),1 a period when it was far from easy for a woman to become an architect. In the late 1940s, when Quintanilha began her academic education, one of the regime’s main goals was to maintain “meticulous control” over Portuguese women. Just after the war, in 1947, the regime shut down the National Council of Portuguese Women, which had been formed in 1914, i.e., during the period of the First Republic (1910–1926).2 Through a subliminal discourse that emphasised the social role of women as pillars of family morals that were needed to build the new nation (Pimentel 2007), the regime made several attempts to impose the domestication of women, which was understood as a return to working in the home and the rearing of children. Such achievements were to be considered the feminine ideal of happiness (Tavares 2011). To a certain extent, these ideals conflicted with the achievements accomplished by the first Portuguese Republican suffragettes, who were inspired by socialist principles. However, during the Estado Novo regime, the income of the husband was not enough to sustain most Portuguese low-income families, and many women needed to hold on to a paid job. The regime attempted to reverse that trend, which spread across Europe in the post-war period due to the labour market conditions, where the cheaper manpower provided by women and children competed directly with that of male workers.

In the Portuguese context, the prohibition of female access to the areas of civil service, diplomacy and law, and restrictions on marriage for professionals in those areas that were at the time considered “female”—education and nursing, amongst others—was not enough to curb women’s access to the labour market (Pimentel 2007). That trend only increased, particularly from the 1960s onwards, due to factors such as the colonial war (the liberation wars in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, 1961–19743), emigration, and the need for a manual labour force on the part of the new multinational companies that gradually settled in Portugal (Tavares 2011). The shortage of male workers coupled with an increased demand created more favourable conditions for the employment of women as technical and specialist staff in several governmental offices. Quintanilha and Caria clearly benefitted from the evolution of the socio-economic conditions described above, which weakened what were originally repressive policies and turned the 1960s into a decade of opportunity for Portuguese female workers.

Both architects began their education at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, where—as Quintanilha later affirmed—there persisted a certain degree of hostility in academic circles because of her sex (Quintanilha 20114). This intimidating climate can in part be explained by the fact that being a female architect in Portugal was relatively new. The first women to graduate in Architecture in the country did so in the 1940s. Maria José Estanco (1905–1999) graduated in 1942, submitting as her final design a proposal for a kindergarten in the Algarve, whence she hailed (Roxo 2016). Curiously enough, Quintanilha was to opt for the same programme for her final examination designs, as shown further below. Estanco chose teaching for her professional career and dedicated herself to teaching the arts in female educational facilities, such as the Instituto de Odivelas, a boarding school for the daughters of Portuguese military officers. In Porto, Maria José Marques da Silva (1914–1994), the second Portuguese female architect, was to take a different path. She made a name for herself in architecture in partnership with her husband, David Moreira da Silva (1909–2002), also an architect. Maria José Marques da Silva, who was also the daughter of an important architect from that city,5 graduated in 1943.

In the African colonial context, which is the focus of this article, cases of other female architects have only recently begun to be studied. It is known that Quintanilha and Caria closely preceded the first African-born Portuguese woman to achieve an architecture degree—Antonieta Jacinto, born in Kahala (Huambo, Angola) in 1930.6 The current research has also identified Ana Torres, who is 15 years younger than Antonieta Jacinto and who also worked in Angola, as the second African woman to graduate in Lisbon and work in Luanda.7 Torres was active in the transition from the colonial period to independence in 1975, working essentially as a Public Works specialist. There have been no reports of any similar cases in other African countries under colonial Portuguese administration at the time this article was drawn up, revealing the precarious state of research in the specific field of Gender Studies, and the general dependence on witness statements from professionals who were active at the time. In isolated cases, oral records have helped to identify architects such as Leonor Figueira, who worked in Mozambique as a specialised worker for large design firms such as Gabinete de Arquitectura, Urbanismo e Decoração Ldª (GAUD), which was established in 1968 in the city of Beira.8 This was a result of the acute lack of architecture professionals, which is one of the aspects explored herein that may have made access to professional practice easier for women.

Carlota Quintanilha graduated from the Porto School of Fine Arts in 1953. Maria Emília Caria, in turn, graduated in Lisbon a few years later.9 Despite the obstacles they experienced, they were professionally successful, even if it was in opposing fields of practice. Quintanilha became self-employed and received public commissions, but also depended on private developers (Milheiro 2011). Caria took a position as a civil servant in the Colonial Public Works Office at the Ministry of Overseas Affairs (Portela 2013). Both worked for the Portuguese colonies in Africa, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, beginning their careers a decade after the end of World War II, when the government policy with respect to the “Portuguese Empire” focused more on developmental programmes as a means of maintaining Portuguese sovereignty (Milheiro 2012; Milheiro 2017). While Quintanilha moved to Angola in 1953, and later to Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), the capital of Mozambique, Caria remained based in Lisbon.

In the Portugal of the 1950s, a number of factors that have to do with the personal biographies of Quintanilha and Caria are important for understanding the obstacles they had to overcome in order to practice their professions on equal terms (always relative) with their male colleagues. The first of these would be the condition of the married woman (Figure 1),10 followed by the socio-economic context of the families of origin, the parents’ education, the knowledge of international culture (a situation that was not common in a country that lived under a dictatorship and where mobility was restricted), and lastly, the fact that they never had children (thus freeing them from the traditional obligations of motherhood).

Quintanilha and Caria were from middle-class families. The former was born in Coimbra, and the latter in Santarém, both of which are middle-sized cities in Portugal. Quintanilha’s father, Aurélio Quintanilha, was an important scientist and a well-known objector to the dictatorial regime. One important detail in her biography is the fact that her mother held a university degree in Biology, and had worked as a high school teacher, which was, at the time, considered a more conventional female occupation than being an architect. After her parents’ divorce, she remained in her father’s custody, which was, at the time, the usual procedure according to Portuguese law. Because of her father’s opposition to the regime, the Estado Novo made it difficult for him to find work in Portugal. Quintanilha’s father accordingly found employment in Paris and Germany, giving her exposure to different European cultures with more open political regimes at the time.

The details of Caria’s childhood and personal life are not yet completely known. Her marriage to an engineer from the national railway company, who was considerably older than she was, may have given her greater freedom of movement in terms of her professional career, including the opportunity to travel to the African colonies in the service of the Ministry of Overseas Affairs, where she worked. Her father, the colonel António José Caria, was also an engineer like her husband, and the secretary general of the Lisbon Geographic Society, a private institution devoted since 1875 to supporting research in the Portuguese colonial territories. He most likely had an in-depth knowledge of Africa, a fact that might have had some influence on Caria’s opportunity to work at the Ministry of Overseas Affairs. At the ministry she worked amongst men, standing out both for her intransigence in defending the common good and for her expertise on urbanism (Seabra 201311). Both Quintanilha and Caria were fully dedicated to the profession and, for different reasons, both never had children.

2. Maria Carlota Quintanilha’s Background

Despite the difference between Quintanilha’s and Caria’s education, they were both familiar with modern culture. The Fine Arts School in Porto, to which Quintanilha transferred in early 1948, along with two other female colleagues, was regarded at the time as a more progressive architectural school than its Lisbon counterpart. Although Lisbon had a more conservative academic approach, modern architecture was still a topic of debate in student circles, where, after the war, real consensus as to the figure of Le Corbusier (Milheiro 2012) was formed. Most of the participants at the First Congress of Portuguese Architects, held in Lisbon in 1948, were still young professionals, born in the first two decades of the 20th century.12 They were a testament to the growing importance of modern architecture in the Portuguese context, having to face down the complacency of the more conservative wing represented by the previous generation, some of whom were professors at the Lisbon School (Figure 2). The debates had a certain degree of intensity, and the trend towards Modernism was eventually victorious in architectural professional circles. However, this had very few consequences in terms of the educational agenda at the Lisbon School, until 1957 (Moniz 201113). That year, the architectural education system was the object of a restructuring process designed to integrate more modern and technological approaches.

During the 1950s, the Portuguese architects also became inspired by new and emerging cultures, such as the Latin American architectural output in general, and the Brazilian in particular (Milheiro 2012; Tostões 2014). Magazines such as the French L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui or the British Architectural Review formed part of daily life in Portuguese architectural offices, and allowed Portuguese architects to feel connected with the rest of the world, despite the political isolation the country experienced. It was not by chance that Quintanilha’s early work was a result of this environment, as she made references to the purism of Le Corbusier’s early architectural designs, by working with flat smooth surfaces, primary colours and pure volumes. Her academic works also revealed this influence.14

As an outcome of World War II, the regime permitted certain modernisations. The 1950s were a fertile period for international conferences held in Lisbon, such as the XXI Federation Internationale de l’Habitation et de l’Urbanisme (1952)—an opportunity for the Portuguese architects to show their Tropical House output in an international showcase—or the third International Union of Architects (UIA) meeting (1953), which brought to Portugal the most recent debates on modern architecture. In Lisbon, topics such as the research on new school buildings in Nordic countries, the relations between art and architecture as practised by the South American architects,15 and the new urbanism ideals reflected by the presence of Sir Leslie Patrick Abercrombie16 as the conference’s chair were all items on the agenda.

Influenced by this modern context, Quintanilha’s graduation design project in Porto, a kindergarten in the town of Vila Real in the north of Portugal, revealed a very strong inclination towards Modernist architecture. It featured a modular organisation, vaulted roofs, and large glass surfaces. In the architect’s statement on the building, she showed solid knowledge of the recent trends in the design of children’s spaces that favoured the motoric and emotional development of the child, as indeed presented in the exhibition of new Scandinavian schools at the Lisbon UIA Congress. This subject matter was also part of one of the UIA discussion sessions. In Portugal, during the 1950s, the educational building was one of the facilities that was most important in terms of public commissions. The Vila Real Kindergarten’s design anticipated a number of built and aesthetic elements, which had to do with the influence of Brazilian and tropical architectural cultures, and proved Quintanilha’s capacity as a newly trained architect (Milheiro 2011).

In 1953, Quintanilha accompanied her husband—the architect João José Tinoco—to the Angolan hinterland, which at the time was considered part of her duties as a newly married woman.17 The decision to emigrate to Angola was not taken by Quintanilha, but was a consequence of the new position of her husband as chief architect in the Cunene Technical Brigade for Development and Settlement. While the Estado Novo regime was in power, the status of married woman involved a number of family obligations, including following one’s husband when he emigrated. Also, from the 1950s onwards, the Estado Novo began incentivising the settlement of Europeans in the colonies—including whole families—as a means of preserving the colonial system. So, it was to be expected that Quintanilha would go to Cunene, not just as a married woman, but also because of the incentives from the Portuguese state. She would only leave Africa two decades later, a few years before the April Revolution in 1974,18 which took place shortly before the former Portuguese African territories achieved their independence.

Tinoco’s presence in Angola was also part of the Estado Novo policies for the colonisation of Angola by poor European settlers through the establishment of colonial villages of rural inspiration. The designs carried out by Quintanilha’s husband during his tenure, which lasted until 1956, are well known and have been surveyed in recent studies (Veloso et al. 2008).19 The research that informed those studies has not, until now, been able to throw light on Quintanilha’s role in Angola, beyond her being the lead architect’s wife. The testimonies of some colleagues attested to Quintanilha’s collaboration as a co-author in important public and private commissions, such as the Biópio dam for hydroelectric power supply and at least two collective housing projects in Sá da Bandeira (now Lubango) (Veloso et al. 2008). But the specific nature of said collaboration was never clearly identified; i.e., whether it was more technical or more aesthetic. Later interviews with Quintanilha were also unproductive. In her opinion, the projects were jointly produced in order to guarantee a larger income for the Tinoco–Quintanilha couple in cases where a third co-designer also existed (Quintanilha 2011). However, this argument does not explain why Quintanilha continued to feature as a co-designer, even when she worked alone with her husband. Clearly, defining levels of collaboration in partnerships is always difficult, especially when the protagonists are intimately involved, as was the case. It is our understanding today that family issues affected Quintanilha’s memories of the conditions in which they lived and worked.

In Angola, the couple lived in quite precarious conditions compared to European sanitary, functional and aesthetic standards.20 Later on, Quintanilha remembered their Cunene house as being a kind of “cubata” (a traditional African hut). The only known image of the couple’s house confirms this description. She also recalled that she missed the urban life she was accustomed to in Portugal. Soon, she convinced her husband to move to Lourenço Marques, where her father worked as the director of the Scientific Research Centre for Cotton at the Colonial Cotton Export Council. Lourenço Marques was a very cosmopolitan colonial city, benefiting from its proximity to Johannesburg. She left for Mozambique in 1956, before her husband, and took up a teaching position, a job considered by colonial society as an appropriate role for a woman. She had already gathered some experience as a high school teacher in Porto before her marriage. In the Mozambican capital, she gave classes at various secondary education levels and in a wide range of schools (Figure 3). Later on, Quintanilha considered teaching to be her most representative professional activity, stating that her architectural practice was less significant (Milheiro 2011), and not separating the African experience from her married life, which became—from her point of view—ill-fated, on account of her husband’s infidelity.21 It is our belief today that she referred more to her work as a teacher because it did not involve any relationship with Tinoco. This situation revealed how she was traumatised by her marriage at a professional level—that which is of interest to us in the context of this article.

3. Maria Emilia Caria: Working at the Colonial Public Works department in the Portuguese Metropole

While Quintanilha began her professional life in Mozambique, divided between teaching and collaborating in her husband’s office, Caria finished her training in Lisbon. In the late 1950s, modern architecture was changing from a more aesthetic and international approach to incorporating a more technical and local sensibility.22 Whilst it is true that the Portuguese training environments in Lisbon and Porto continued to resist modernity, all the new trends were reflected in the practices of the leading architectural firms and in the dominant culture.23 International magazines, such as L’Architettura—Cronache e Storia, edited by Bruno Zevi since 1954, became popular in the Portuguese circles (Tostões 1997; Moniz 2011; Milheiro 2017). The organic formulation promoted by Zevi as part of the Modern Movement renewal in the 1950s was received well in Portuguese circles.24 The organic approach influenced the architectural design practised by Caria’s future colleagues in the official department, such as the architects Alfredo da Silva e Castro and António Saragga Seabra,25 with whom she was to maintain a deep friendship during the time they worked together at the Ministry of Overseas Affairs (Seabra 2013). Organised trips to visit Alvar Aalto’s works, and the reproduction of ideas from architects such as Josep Antoni Coderch or Carlo Scarpa in Portuguese magazines, reflected new dynamics and an emerging architectural culture26 (Tostões 1997). In Portugal, the decade was also marked by the Survey of Portuguese Regional Architecture, released in book form in 1961 under the title Arquitectura Popular em Portugal (Vernacular Architecture in Portugal), an approach to the diversity of expression in vernacular architecture and settlements (SNA 1961). For the first time, architects were directly involved with rural communities who inhabited remote regions of the country.27 They made drawings of their houses and their agricultural tools, described their ways of living and construction systems, and photographed their buildings both empty and inhabited. This methodological approach was in line with Caria’s working processes for Africa, i.e., surveying the local populations in their habitat (Figure 4). Photographs, sketches and brief descriptions usually make up her surveys conducted in the 1960s. One important difference was that she had no intention of publishing her surveys, but used them to illustrate detailed reports, which were indispensable tools for design and for the proposal of new urban plans.28

By 1962, Caria was already working for the Council of Town Planning and Housing at the General Council for Public Works and Communications, a department of the Ministry of Overseas Affairs that was closed down after the revolution in April 1974.29 In connection with her duties at this office, she travelled through Angola (mainly Luanda), Cape Verde and Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau). Her main role was as a planning consultant, but she also designed new urban development plans for Cape Verdean cities (Figure 5), or proposed partial urban plans for Bissau, the capital of Guinea. As far as the islands of Cape Verde are concerned, Caria was responsible for urban development plans on the islands of Santo Antão, Sal, Santiago and São Vicente, including the towns of Porto Novo, Ribeira Grande, Santa Maria, Mindelo, Baía das Gatas and Praia, the Cape Verdean capital. In order to accomplish these plans, she and António Seabra integrated the Urbanism and Housing Work Group of Cape Verde Province in 1965, the year of their first report on the region (Portela 2013).30 The work group was involved in urban and housing issues, the two most serious problems in the province.31

Up until 1974, Caria developed 23 urban development plans for the Ministry of Overseas Affairs (Figure 6). Work was begun on only one such plan, in Baía Mindelo, but it was never finished (Portela 2013). Most of her work was halted because of the independence processes for Cape Verde and Guinea. Other plans faced local opposition. In several missions to Cape Verde, Seabra was witness to numerous discussions between Caria and specialists from the local Public Works department.32 Caria fought against private interests, which most likely threatened the colonial status quo to some extent, and this situation almost certainly did not help in implementing her urban ideas in the field.33 Given her knowledge of the African habitat and ways of living, she advocated that local communities should be integrated into the new plans, thus preventing traditional colonial segregation but also keeping pre-existing self-built structures safe from demolition. She also argued that African populations should benefit from the facilities brought by the new improvements.34 This was the case of the Baía das Gatas plan (1963–1972), which was essentially a tourist programme for civil servants which, in her opinion, should also serve the fisher population of Salamansa (Portela 201335).

Caria’s approach to her work covered aspects such as climate, topography, and the organisation of pre-existing settlements, with the aim of introducing urban occupation mechanisms that did not result in large cases of discontinuity, or “voids”. Her intentions were very pragmatic and based on detailed surveys of the population, manpower and building materials. The disadvantaged population, which at the time was made up of African people and sometimes a few poor European settlers, was the main focus of her designs. In Praia, where the topography is quite hilly, giving rise to a number of plateaux (known locally as “achadas”), Caria’s plans (carried out from 1969 to 197236) always tried to create continuous urban grids, through the integration of new neighbourhoods (planned for the various “achadas” that configure the city’s geography) as a complement to the central area of the city and the main plateau (or “Achada Principal”). The latter area was home to only 27% of the urban population, while the rest was distributed across the adjacent areas.37 The main purpose was to connect the historic city with the new areas of expansion, consolidating them as an urban whole. In this process, already existing neighbourhoods (many of them self-built) were to be reintegrated by means of the insertion of new residential complexes (Figure 7). In Mindelo (São Vicente island), Caria also endeavoured to fill the voids between the historic centre and the surrounding areas, where the poorest population lived in very disadvantaged conditions and without the proper facilities, in a plan submitted to Mindelo Town Council in 1969.38 In most of her plans, economic reasons ruled out the total replacement of the pre-existing houses. The proposed solution, aimed at regenerating the urban layout, included analysis of the truly uninhabitable areas (to prevent construction activity before a new plan was drawn up), the creation of new neighbourhoods and the progressive renewal of the pre-existing but uninhabitable buildings (Figure 8).

In the context of the Lisbon office, Caria’s approach to urban planning revealed a certain degree of modernisation in relation to her colleagues’ urban designs. The static, monumental and functional lines from the early 1950s, a legacy of the times when the office was called the Colonial/Overseas Planning Office (before 1957), gave way to a more dynamic design. A more conservative approach to urban design, that combined elements of the Garden City trend with the general image of the City Beautiful movement, was replaced by organic and empirical options, resulting in more free-form urban planning. This design approach agreed very much with Caria’s work methods, particularly the surveys and the important role she conferred upon the African inhabitants, who were the majority of the “economically weak” population. This was, of course, an adaptation that went with the zeitgeist, given the growing importance of studying local habitats so as to produce designs with a vernacular influence, as featured in Bernard Rudofsky’s peerless compilation, published in 1964, Architecture without architects—A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed Architecture (Rudofsky 1964).

4. Quintanilha: Working in Colonial Mozambique

The 1960s was an important decade for Quintanilha, and was also a more productive period for her architectural activity, both in terms of design and building. Quintanilha started to practice architecture and urbanism after the arrival of her husband in Lourenço Marques in 1956, when they began designing together ephemeral buildings, such as the Agriculture Pavilion (Mozambican Economic Activities Exhibition, Lourenço Marques, 1956) or the Mozambican Pavilion (Central Trade Fair, Bulawayo, former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, 1959) (Miranda 2013; Magalhães 201539). After 1960, the couple worked on several commissions for the Public Works department of the former Portuguese colony, sometimes in partnership with other Mozambican colleagues.40 Some design projects involved important buildings in the colonial context, such as the Government District and Department headquarters, in towns like Vila Cabral (now Lichinga, in Niassa, 1959–1962) or Vila Amélia (now Cabo Delgado, in Pemba, 1963–1966). The couple also designed several aeronautical facilities, such as the Porto Amélia and Vila Cabral aerodrome, and worked with the architect Alberto Soeiro on the Head Offices of the Maputo Aeronautical Services and on Nampula airport (Figure 9 and Figure 10).

Generally speaking, historians of architecture have considered the buildings designed by the Tinoco–Quintanilha couple in the early half of the 1960s to be a reflection of the Corbusier lexicon, combined with some Latin and South American forms of expression (Fernandes 2002; Milheiro 2011; Miranda 2013; Magalhães 2015). This categorisation is in line with the academic education they shared at the Porto School, and especially with Tinoco’s involvement in Portuguese Modernist circles, such as the Organisation of Modern Architects (ODAM—Organização dos Arquitectos Modernos), which was based in Porto.41 In 1958, now in Mozambique, Tinoco wrote on the advantages of Modern Architecture, a combination of technology and art (Magalhães 2015). He was also of the opinion that the modern idiom and technological approaches had to adjust to the regional context. These arguments go some way to explaining their architectural approach to Brazilian-influenced forms and climate-based solutions.

By the early 1970s, Tinoco was developing a more “Brutalist” approach, in line with the new international trends. The colonial/liberation war, which began in Mozambique in 1964, increased private initiative, which was encouraged by the colonial government as part of the measures taken to fight the independence movements. This process provided new opportunities for architects who, like Tinoco and Quintanilha, lived off commissions; it probably also paved the way for greater experimentation. By the end of the 1960s, however, the couple had already divorced.

In 1966, Quintanilha begun to distance herself from her husband and started working with other Mozambique-based architects. It is possible that the works she referred to, in interviews and in her personal resumé, as being exclusively her design were produced between that year and 1972, when she returned to Lisbon. She references the Mozambican Agronomic Research Institute (IIAM), for which she conducted an urban planning study, designed the refurbishing, extension and renewal of pre-existing buildings, and created a model house for employees, and the rest home for the National Union of Commercial and Industrial Workers (SNECI), in Namaacha. She also referenced, albeit generically, projects for private clients (Quintanilha 2011).

As she worked for most of her professional career in a family context, it is now exceedingly difficult to define the actual contribution Quintanilha made to each project in which she participated as a co-designer. Beyond her graduation project and some school designs for the Portuguese Ministry of Education in the 1980s, i.e., long after her return from Africa, we are unable to identify a design that was produced by Quintanilha alone. In contrast to Caria, to whom several works can be attributed very precisely, Quintanilha’s design projects were mainly carried out in partnerships with male colleagues. It is equally difficult to establish her ideals, as Quintanilha did not write or otherwise speak on her own considerations of architecture or urbanism beyond her graduation project. Caria, on the other hand, wrote extensive and detailed reports regarding her work and her architectural principles. After each mission in the service of the Ministry of Overseas Affairs, Caria reported on her impressions, describing the surveys, the negotiation processes and the design options. In those reports she expressed her ideas about African urbanism, including the urgent need for proper sanitary and living conditions. Her ideas seemed not to have a strong theoretical framework, depending greatly on her observations in the field and, probably, on the exchange of ideas with colleagues within her office. She did not mention bibliographical references, besides UN (United Nations) reports, which became an important source of data on Africa in Portuguese circles after the main events of African independence.

5. Final Considerations: Being a Woman Architect in Colonial Africa before the Revolution

If Quintanilha’s contribution is a somewhat ambiguous one for the community of Portuguese architects, Caria’s colleagues referred to her presence in the context of the office she worked at as really important. Being a woman architect in Africa, as Quintanilha endeavoured to be, was not as difficult as it was in the metropolitan context. The lack of technical expertise in the colonial territories made it possible for almost everybody to have an opportunity. Colonial society was also reputed to be less conservative in matters relating to women. Several other female architects give accounts of similar professional experiences, mostly pertaining to familial partnerships, just as in the case of the Tinoco–Quintanilha couple.42 Quintanilha’s personal life, culminating in her divorce, had a strong influence on her own view of her role during the 10 years that she worked with her husband in Mozambique, between 1956 and 1966. In the rare interviews she gave, when the gender issue was gaining importance in Portuguese colonial architectural history, and in which Quintanilha was asked about her design projects, she refused to describe her professional life in Africa beyond her work as a high school teacher (Milheiro 2011).

It is also true that Quintanilla’s work is known mostly because of her husband. Portuguese and Mozambican historians have taken an interest in this birth of the modern approach associated with Tinoco’s design (Fernandes 2002; Veloso et al. 2008; Miranda 2013; Magalhães 2015). They recognise that his very charismatic personality overshadowed Quintanilha somewhat. Tinoco worked in Mozambique until 1977, witnessing the first two years after independence, and is currently referred to as one of the most important Mozambican architects in the colonial period after World War II, along with Fernando Mesquita and Pancho Guedes (Miranda 2013). Quintanilha, on the other hand, has always been a secondary figure, “the architect’s wife” who was also trained as an architect. When colonial studies began focussing on architecture, the existence of a woman architect who was involved in the modern African adventure emerged as an emotional phenomenon. Only recently has Quintanilha been credited as the possible author of designs. In her late years, she was unable to help in making her real contribution understandable.

Despite the lack of knowledge about Caria’s personal life, her work was held in great esteem by the people who met her in a professional environment. She was able to work on an independent basis, putting her own name to her urban plans, debating her ideas on a par with male colleagues, and imposing a strong presence in relation to the political and government authorities (Seabra 2013). Moreover, and in contrast to Quintanilha, her marital situation would seem to have aided her career. As she was married to a non-architect, Caria did not experience the ambiguity of having to “compete” with the professional qualities of her husband. This reveals how individual narratives, whilst important, are not always transmissible. Caria’s case also shows how a married woman in the Estado Novo period was able to achieve a certain degree of independence and recognition through her professional work.

Both women, however, help to answer the original question: how did female architects shape a modern world in the late period of Portuguese colonialism in Africa, just before the Carnation Revolution? Quintanilha was part of a solid modern culture, and had a capacity for absorbing international forms, ways of expression and techniques that she explored with Tinoco in “beautiful buildings”. Her work can be analysed in an orthodox modern context. Caria placed the disadvantaged populations in the colonies at the centre of the urban debate. These populations were constituted the majority in the African world, and had an important role to play in the construction of a new world in her plans. Caria’s approach to urbanism represents the climax of a long process of colonisation, that started out regarding the European settler as the most important matter and then evolved towards looking at the African people. In the early 1970s, learning from the local context was part of the deal. Architecture without architects really changed minds, becoming a “slogan”, and Africa was fertile in case studies that fitted that description. At no stage were her professional qualities ever questioned by the other architects—all of them male—who shared a work environment, either occasionally or on a more regular basis, with her. Even in professions similar to her own—such as engineering, which normally occupied a higher level in the hierarchy than architecture—the same recognition existed. This fact is proof that despite the expectations that the Estado Novo maintained regarding the role of women in Portuguese post-war society, there were mechanisms of affirmation that were provided by the practice of architecture. In exceptional conditions, when said women ventured into an active professional life, their contribution to architectural and planning culture could reach high levels of technical and aesthetic quality, as is obvious in the case of Quintanilha, or of social conscience, as the diverse plans produced by Caria document. In this context, both were respected in their day. It is now up to historiography to pursue these individual narratives, with the aim of better defining their contributions to the discipline of architecture, and complementing their arguments with cases of other women architects in the former Portuguese colonies.