POPULAR ARCHITECTURE AMONG VERNACULAR AND ERUDITE CONTEXTS Pedro Fonseca Jorge CES – Centro de Estudos Sociais – Universidade de Coimbra Abstract: In our present and contemporary architectural context abstractionism as become the face of a theoretical crisis where words seem to be the main form of communicating visually incomprehensible shapes. Therefore we need to search for a more figurative architecture based upon our landscape's features, making it necessary to proceed to Typological researches about our built surroundings. Rural housing has been a forgotten research field, as people tend to pay more attention to dense fabrics, but that doesn't mean that heritage can't be found in rural contexts. In this way to study rural architecture is to include Types of architecture that may or may not include features from other cultures than their own. This paper will try to define the features that define these Types, according to the contexts of Vernacular architecture (when there are no more references than the culture where it is produced) and Popular Architecture (where Signs or Significances have been brought from different contexts, being them Vernacular, Popular or Erudite). Keywords: Popular Architecture, Vernacular architecture, Erudite architecture. 1. Introduction This article is based upon the need to create a lexicon in the "Architecture without Architects" domain in order to distinguish different types of interventions included in this typology. Among these types we can define a first one where there is no contamination from cultures outside the one where the type is created, opposed to another kind of "architectless" architecture that inherits signs beyond its cultural borders. Despite this fact, we still can't define this type as "Erudite", not only because it remains based upon popular knowledge, but because its influences can range from erudite architecture to other cultural contexts defined as vernacular or popular – or "without architects". The need to define this type of architecture – without a single author, but with external influences – was felt in previous researches, where, for example, the Rural Housing Type from the surroundings of the city of Alcobaça, Portugal, was surveyed and its models collected. Alcobaça's City Hall and its archives was the elected source to support the proposed researched, focused on the year of 1961: not also this was the year where the city hall's records began (although there where previous documentation, lost nowadays), but this date also corresponded to the year where the book "Arquitectura Popular em Portugal" (Popular Architecture in Portugal) was published. 2. The reference This book, commonly referred as the "Inquiry", was a national survey promoted by the Portuguese National Architects' Syndicate, where various teams of architects joined together to collect information about rural Portuguese architecture, which its authors believed to be disappearing gradually. Roughly the same reasons that lead Bernard Rudofsky to publish "Architecture without Architects" in 1964: industrialization, architecture's internationalization (we were already in a period where the Modernist dogmas were being criticized), the abandonment of the countryside in search of better living conditions in the cities, etc. In Portugal, the country was "divided" in several regions, each one with an assigned team that would research the architectural types in risk of disappearing. Different criteria among the teams about what was really "popular" architecture, for instance, lead to a survey not always coherent, but still this book was fundamental as an architecture manifesto, but also political statement.