Paper short abstract:

Macao as a port city is related to other Portuguese colonial port cities as well as to other port cities world-wide, connected through the development of colonialism, imperialism and of the world-economic system. What were the counter-colonial influences in the developments of colonial architecture?

Paper long abstract:

Macao as a port city is related to other Portuguese colonial port cities as well as to other port cities world-wide, connected through the development of colonialism, imperialism and of the world-economic system.

Was there in Macao an exclusive Portuguese colonial architecture?

What were the counter-colonial influences in the developments of colonial architecture?

Colonial architecture has been generally described as an import of eclectic and neo-classical forms from the motherlands and cores of Empires to their respective peripheries. This notion mainly based on a formal approach does not seem to provide an adequate answer for some of these questions. Even considering that the forms and architectural languages of most colonial buildings are sometimes a direct import from either metropolitan, imperial or other peripheral forms and norms, the modes of production and the technological means had always to be adapted somehow to local, climatic, social, political or other, conditions.

A fine example of this was the fact that the church of S. Pauls was built in the coast of China mainly with Japanese workers that, as it seems, were not experienced to carry out the stone work; or at least, the church was built with construction techniques that were completely unknown in this part of the world.

In trying to perceive what the relations might be between colonialism and architecture, architecture have to be understood, as Anthony King suggested, on a global scale, in relation with regional and international, political, economic, social and cultural aspects of the world economic system.