the younger Ant?nio Rodrigues da Silva

(b Paris, 29 April 1868; d Lisbon, 9 Oct 1937). Portuguese engineer and architect. He was a son of the painter Ant?nio Rodrigu?s da Silva the elder (1836-c. 1900) and qualified as an engineer at the Instituto Industriale Comercial, Lisbon. In 1895 he entered public service as a supervisor of building works, with particular responsibility for the port of Lisbon. Though not trained as an architect, his abilities as a skilful designer led to a number of architectural commissions in and around Lisbon including a hotel (1911) at Vidago, the F?brica de Cervejas Germ?nia brewery (1912-13), Lisbon, and the interior decoration of the Clube Monumental (now Casa do Alentejo), also in Lisbon. In these works he followed the middle-class historicist taste of the capital, which still favoured the French Beaux-Arts style or revivals of the Manueline and Moorish styles. He also designed houses in the Casa Portuguesa tradition: this style, based on the revival of traditional Portuguese domestic architecture, had been contentious since the beginning of the 20th century, the initiators of the movement being uncertain whether to favour the northern, stone-built manor house with Baroque elements or the whitewashed, rectilinear house typical of the southern Alentejo region, with elements deriving from its Moorish heritage. Silva's Casa Portuguesa designs added nothing original to this controversy: he simply applied decorative touches, such as bands of azulejos (glazed tiles), verandahs with balustrades and eaves and porches of oriental shape to very traditional plans. Some of Silva's more ambitious designs, such as the C?mara Municipal (1915), Cascais, and a lavish casino (1916) and baths (1917) for Estoril, remained unrealized due to the deep depression following World War I. Furthermore, Portuguese architects were by then beginning to move away from historicism towards a Modernist aesthetic. Silva turned instead to examining the architectural aspects of Theosophy, having founded a Portuguese Theosophical Society. As editor of its journal, A Atl?ntida, he propagated a fantastic architecture that few people in Lisbon were culturally equipped to understand.

See the Abbreviations for further details.