The Coimbra practice of João Branco and Paula del Rio was commissioned to reconfigure the tourist office and Praça Cónego Manuel Fernandes Nogueira, the only flat open space in Piódão, creating a unified image of them. The schist houses of this villa
The project involved renovating a two-story house that had been abandoned for twenty years. The solid concrete construction showed many signs of having been vandalized. A surgery-like material and aesthetic reconstruction was performed by means of ap
Olimpo Nômade, a city for the performing artists at an itinerant music festival, is made up of three elements: an inflatable doughnut is the lounge area; a camp of bubbles, the dressing rooms; and a mirrored cube, the space for the headliners...
On a slightly sloping plot of land in the historic quarter of Ansião, in the District of Leiria, the building is organized in an orthogonal arrangement, striking a contrast with the curves of the courtyards and the slabs of concrete. The Portuguese w
In Esmoriz, a city within the Região de Aveiro, stands this contemporary reinterpretation of the palheiro, the fisherman's house that has marked the Portuguese coastline since the early 19th century. To promote the idea of preserving this vernacular
In the town of Barreiro, in Setúbal, the remains of two old warehouses, unified into a single space, are integrated in the project as the outer enclosure of the house. Outside, the ruin appearance and the traces of the industrial past of this area, b
An arc conforms to the odd shape of the plot. Steps serves to organize everyday life. A slope directs rainwater. An eccentric form confronts a suburban backdrop...
A maximum buildable volume was found to be a distorted box, in a project mostly about its interior form. Rising two levels, five houses pretend to be one: a plural wedding cake...
Two curved walls run smoothly through both levels, gently dissociating private and public. A longitudinal axis is highlighted by two metallic masks. Users become actors and spectators...
In a complex but simple project, a warehouse is taken as an idea of a house, becoming a living room. Scale, materiality, and a ‘kind of memory’ are equally important...
An off-center column acts like a hinge and divides each level into equal quadrants. On the lower level, undivided, the column levitates slightly from the ground...
Six dwellings in two buildings – four identical and two exceptional – surround a communal garden hidden inside a city block, with one architecture tying together the fragmented reality...
Under a cheap metal roof, the interiors form a unity characterized by whiteness and precision, while the outside expression is that of a loose juxtaposition of constructive elements...
Exuberant rooms are assembled between two antagonistic marble masks. Unorthodox everyday spaces are built in accordance with a clearly defined syntax and grammar...
Portugal was born in Guimarães. At least that is what the – modern – inscription on one of its walls says, in allusion to the fact that the first independent Portuguese king, Afonso Henriques, established his court in this town, after defeating the a
With a contemporary language and deferring to the environment, this house is located in the Lisbon quarter of Lapa, by the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. On a narrow and elongated plot, the dwelling presents a facade with wooden lattices on the doors
Within the Quinta da Ponte in the Portuguese town of Sintra, a few kilometers from Lisbon, is this two-story construction that is part of a row of buildings arranged along the perimeter wall of the property. The ground floor contained a shop, and the
The Portuguese firm fala – set up in 2013 by Ahmen Belkhodja, Filipe Magalhães, and Ana Luisa Soares – built this transparent guesthouse-studio that takes up the entire width of a narrow garden. Connected to the property's main house by paths of woo
So eager to modernize, the 19th century’s rulers did not properly weigh up the potential effects of their disentailment policies, leaving a vast pool of church property unprotected. In the case of the Convent of Beato António, what the 1755 earthquak
The renovation respects the building as it is, with its protected, listed main facade, the result of a vertical stacking of various extensions which have functioned well together. The rear facade, less cared for, rises only two levels. The house is
In a remote spot of the Portuguese village of Paradinha (Alvarenga), in Aveiro District, eleven cabins are carefully arranged around existing trees, following the natural topography. The place being hard to reach warranted simplifying the building pr
São Cosme do Vale, a parish within the municipality of Vila Nova de Famalicão, in northwestern Portugal's Braga District, is the location of an equestrian center by Visioarq Arquitectos (Nuno Poiarez, Pedro Afonso, Vicente Gouveia). The idea was to i
Successive operations of dubious quality, carried out in the course of recent decades, had disfigured a 16th-century farmhouse, and in adapting it for use as a family residence the objective was to restore original elements of the construction, conso
Since 2014, the price of housing in Portugal has been increasing more than 6% per year. Lisbon was the municipality in the country most affected by this problem, infecting the surrounding districts and pushing inhabitants out of the centre. The exhib
1935-2022 The most international name in Portuguese painting, Paula Rego, died in London at 87. She grew up in a well-off family in Lisbon during the dictatorship of Salazar, a situation which prompted this restless young woman to leave the country i
Despite the inevitable brevity of her career, Maria Antónia Leite Siza (Porto, 1940-1973) produced more than 3.000 drawings and paintings. Crippled women, disfigured bodies and, in sum, victims of misery and circumstance, filled her work in an exerci
From the early canvases in protest against the Estado Novo to her images of women in pain, Paula Rego defended a militant art up to the end of her days.
I was born in Matosinhos, in 1933, into a large family. We were five siblings, common at the time, and twelve people living at home, starting with my grandmother, who had come from Brazil as a widow with six children. We ate all together and converse
I believe it was John Cage who once told me, “When you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one b
Whereas the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world, the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of
Looking at the past and the future at the same time, the Roman god of thresholds and transitions sums up well the profuse career of Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus, two brothers and two studios that use geometry to take in each project a path that
1953-2019 The architect and critic Manuel Graça Dias died in his home city of Lisbon on 24 March. Graduated in 1977 from the ESBAL of Lisbon, he started teaching at the schools of architecture of Lisbon and Porto, where he completed his PhD in 2009.
Saïd Hejal (Kronos Homes), who recently presented the project for two towers in Valencia with Ricardo Bofill, has commissioned Eduardo Souto de Moura – currently the subject of an extensive exhibition at the Casa da Arquitectura in Matosinhos – to ca
For years the field of action of Álvaro Siza (Matosinhos, 1933) has extended beyond the boundaries of his native Portugal, transferring the master’s ideas to a variety of contexts in Europe, America, and recently also Asia. It is in this latest stage
The jury of the first Leon Battista Alberti Prize, formed by representatives of the Politecnico di Milano, the Alberti Foundation, and Mantua City Hall, has unanimously voted to hand the award to the Portuguese architect João Carrilho da Graça, ackno
Álvaro Siza has designed a €7.5 coin in honour of fellow Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, which will be put into circulation in Portugal on 12 December 2018. The silver alloy coin features an abstract outline of the crown of a tree
Mine was a normal childhood, in a conservative and religious family of northern Portugal – my family is from Braga. My uncles, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers were educated, they all studied Greek and Latin in Coimbra, or medicine and psychiatry
After a long period of decadence, the stately old Lisbon evoked by the actress and fado singer Amália Rodrigues has become a popular destination that already threatens to eclipse foci of tourist obsession like Venice and Barcelona. An unbeatable exam
Articulated by images, objects, and ideas rather than by buildings, the Lisbon Triennale questions the essence of architecture in the world today.
In the fifties and sixties, the house was the experimentation laboratory through which modernity was introduced in Spain and Portugal, but also subjected to revision.
Modernity turned each house into a manifesto, and the history of architecture in the 20th century can be summed up with domestic constructions that became milestones in a journey of discovery. This tradition of expressing the aesthetic intentions of
Is there such a thing as ‘Portuguese architecture’? In the early decades of the 20th century, modern architecture was for the Portuguese an aspiration postponed, considering the political and cultural circumstances of the period, with its tendency to
Portugal was rescued by the EU in 2011, and Spain the following year, so the two Iberian countries seem to be departing from Europe like the stone raft that Saramago imagined, breaking off from the continent as a crack opened in the Pyrenees. But tha
Un muro perforado acoge el conjunto de viviendas para personas mayores en Alcácer do Sal, Portugal, diseñado por los lisboetas Aires Mateus. Posado sobre un encinar cuya pendiente entierra parcialmente el programa, el edificio se pliega en torno a un
La arquitectura del nuevo Pritzker no se funda sólo en su coherencia constructiva o en su expresividad formal, sino también en su distancia irónica y crítica respecto al presente: un anacronismo que la hará perdurar.
André Tavares Diego Inglez de Souza Equações de Aquitectura
Casal de Cambra 2016
Caleidoscópio - 208 Pages
José Neves
Porto 2014
Dafne Editora - 408 Pages
Arquitectura contemporânea. Norte de Portugal