Revintage
By António Neves, architect
The house featured in the photo above was designed in 1957 by architect Mário Carlos Barbosa Ferreira, located in Porto, on Avenida Fernão de Magalhães, and restored by us. Ferreira graduated in 1940 from the Oporto School of Fine Arts. We learned about his collaboration with two of the most relevant architectural offices in the city at that time, the one headed by Arménio Losa and Cassiano Barbosa and the other by Viana de Lima.
By David Ellul
Born on August 26th 1888 and residing at Valletta, Gustave Romeo Vincenti, was the son of Luigi Vincenti, a wealthy trader and merchant who imported goods such as wines, spirits, cigars and cigarettes in Malta during the late 19th and early 20th Century.
The question we often get asked is what typifies a European interior. To be sure, we’re not referring to “interior design” in the sense of a uniform interior showing a designer’s “hand”, but rather the everyday interiors that shaped our lives. What typified the design trends that our parents, grandparents and earlier generations used to shaped their daily environment?
The UK website Nostalgia Central had a go at defining what made up European interiors during the 1960s:
“The majority of homes in the 1960s were furnished with an eclectic mixture of furniture from a variety of periods, but the increase in the number of young people setting up homes in their own flats and bed-sits bred a new ‘young’ environment.”
Read more on the Nostalgia Central website
> Header photo by Max Harlynking on Unsplash
The Revintage project had its third meeting last January in Porto, Portugal, in which the participants further outlined their efforts to partner with VET (Vocational Education and Training) institutions in order to further the preservation of post-war European interiors.
In general, we saw a lot of interest in the subject and the need to pay attention to it. At the same time, we also experienced that it is sometimes difficult to get in touch with representatives of the VET sector. This is not necessarily due to disinterest but to time and the limited possibilities that the current curriculum has in terms of supplementation with new topics. The three partners’ approaches differed as a result of the opportunities. However, this led to an interesting complementary approach that gave us more information.
The central question for the next stage of the project is: What could be the role of VET and heritage institutions and -professionals in preserving post-war interiors? Keep posted for more news.
You can download and read the report of Revintage Activity 3 via this link (pdf file).
Header photo by Everaldo Coelho on Unsplash
Now that we are under way with Revintage, we’re glad to give you the first results of the project. These are two research papers:
These are just the first steps in the project; much more will follow.
Visit the reports of the first two project activities here.
RevIntAge, a project dedicated to the preservation of and education on post-war European interiors, meets in Malta on 30 and 31 August, in order to exchange experiences, methods, and ways to ensure the preservation of interior heritage.
Read more about the project here.
The history and legacy of our interior spaces have received far smaller attention, both from heritage experts and builders, than one would have expected given the time that we spend in them. Part of the reason may have been that it was long considered to be a woman’s domain, and therefore less deserving of scholarly attention than the outer, male-dominated world.