Mendonça Mansion: eclecticism, internationalism and progress

Abstract

Built between 1900 and 1909, the ‘Palacete Mendonça’ (Mendonça Mansion) was designed by Miguel Ventura Terra and served as the home of Henrique José Monteiro Mendonça, who was a landowner in S. Tomé e Principe and a great capitalist in Lisbon at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Located at the top of ‘Parque Eduardo VII’ (Eduardo VII Park) it is one more fragment in an already quite fragmented urban landscape made of separate and unfinished projects. The aim of the present paper is to think about the idea of city and the domestic project behind the project of this home in particular and its specific location. Thus, I will analyse the relationships between the architect, the site and the owner in order to understand to what extent these two actors, themselves and in their interaction with the site share a certain idea of internationalism and progress. In architecture, it is precisely the Eclecticism that embodies this ideas and brings into being this city fragment in fin-de-siècle Lisbon.