By the mid-19th Century the capital of the State of Pará started being affected by the first urban transformations resulting from the richness brought in by the extraction of rubber. Beginning with the expansion of the rubber economy in 1870, this conjuncture allowed for interventions and improvements based on the ideals of modernity, progress and civilization introduced by the public authority in the construction of a modern Belém: this period extends up to the end of the rubber cycle, around 1910. When evoking the architecture of the period under study, as seen by common sense, one should stress the great legacy of the rubber cycle, reflected in a process set in riches and opportunities in which houses were built according to imported, European standards of modernity and became the very symbol of that modernity. Then again, there were also houses that threatened the project of urban modernization created for a New Belém, which prompted the creation of some guidelines and measures in order to prevent or remove those non-conforming abodes, forcing their dwellers to live in the outskirts of the city. Thus, we realize this context allowed for the building of new and different kinds of dwelling, in which the dwellers’ resources would be evidenced by the architectural division of their houses, both bourgeois and popular – two extremes between which the forms of habitation in the Belle Époque in Belém could be defined. Thus the house becomes an important document for the understanding of the influence of external effects – economical, social, technical, cultural, related to public policies, artistic, spatial and others – on its construction. The greatest challenge of this paper is to reveal the habitational diversity found in the different forms of dwelling in the period in question.
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