Pedra Líquida   Portugal   With a built area of 520 square meters, this block of tourist housing takes up a plot on Rúa Pedro Álvares Cabral, in Porto, where a leafy tree used to stand. The project seeks to bring back memories of that tree, which was removed for construction w

NOARQ | José Carlos Nunes de Oliveira   Portugal   Trofa is Portugal’s youngest municipality, belonging to the district of Porto, in the north. For more than 25 years, the City Council occupied spaces scattered across the city. A 2016 competition to turn some old industrial facilities into a single T

Baile Menduiña del medio atelier Luis Manuel Pereira   Portugal   The team formed by the Spanish firm Baile Menduiña and two Portuguese practices – del medio atelier and Luis Manuel Pereira – has won the competition to refurbish and extend the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), in Lisbon’s Chaido district.

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   Although Portugal is mainly a maritime country, its inland is traversed by mighty mountains, largely unknown of but whose beauty will not be unfamiliar to those who have read authors like Eça de Queirós or Miguel Torga. In one of those ranges, on a m

RM Arquitectura Ricardo Bak Gordon   Portugal   The project takes up a portion of land adjacent to the Municipal Gallery building, in the heart of the center of Montijo, in the Portuguese district of Setúbal. A kind of hortus conclusus featuring two outdoor ‘rooms’ varying in altitude, the 80-squa

Kengo Kuma OODA architecture   Portugal   The Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian has reopened after almost four years of renovation works. It is located on the campus of the Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian. The main feature of the intervention carried out by Kengo Kuma – in collaboration with t

Kengo Kuma OODA architecture   Portugal   This project involved turning an old slaughterhouse into a cultural, social, and business center for the northern Portuguese city of Porto. Comprising 22,000 square meters, the intervention sought to revitalize a degraded place in disuse, respecting

OODA architecture MassLab   Portugal   A proposal submitted by OODA in partnership with MassLab won the competition organized by the Barrosinha Agricultural Company to transform its Herdade da Barrosinha lands in the Portuguese municipality of Alcácer do Sal. Encompassing approximately 2,

Arquitectura-G   Portugal   This building is located by the main vehicle access of the Quinta de Recreio estate, and replaces an auxiliary building that collapsed and was irrecoverable. Due to current regulations, the new construction recovers the footprint, the volume, and the

Arquitectura-G   Portugal   Originally, this building – currently under construction – contained the winery and residence of the workers and household staff of Quinta de Recreio. The existing volume contained different divided segments connected by several stairs. Despite the c

João Luís Carrilho da Graça   Portugal   A Manueline abbey gains back its original configuration when freed of additions made over time that overburdened its loadbearing structure and had the effect of distorting its simple proportions.

Eduardo Souto de Moura Luís Peixoto   Portugal   The 18th-century edifice that completed Portugal’s largest monastery now harbors a hotel establishment that endeavors to highlight the value of the heritage site without stagnating it.

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   In establishing its foundation, Porto’s most famous bookshop makes one of the country’s earliest constructions coexist with a sculptural pavilion that echoes its volumes on a contemporary note. The premises were reconstructed in the 20th century unde

fala   Portugal   The Portuguese firm fala – founded in 2013 by Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, and Ahmed Belkhodja— has turned a warehouse and offices into a house of many faces. On a long narrow plot located in a largely abandoned industrial zone, it arises from

Branco del Rio   Portugal   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

NOARQ | José Carlos Nunes de Oliveira   Portugal   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

Langarita Navarro   Portugal   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...

Bruno Dias Arquitectura   Portugal   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

Pedro Henrique    Portugal   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

Aires Mateus   Portugal   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

fala   Portugal   The roof slopes. The perimeter wall curves. The central space is fragmented. These three gestures shape a colorful one-story single-family block located in a suburban corner plot, a situation that determines the alignment of each facade. The volume i

fala   Portugal   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...

fala   Portugal   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...

To think of monasteries and Portugal is to think of the novel Memorial do Convento (published in English as Baltasar and Blimunda), where in Baroque prose José Saramago intertwined the pursuits of a group of heterodox characters with the construction

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

Antonio Lucas   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.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Álvaro Siza   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

Manuel Aires Mateus   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

Marta Sequeira   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

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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

Domus   Jessica Mairs   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

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Eduardo Souto de Moura   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

Maite Báguena   Articulated by images, objects, and ideas rather than by buildings, the Lisbon Triennale questions the essence of architecture in the world today. 

Ana Tostões   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.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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

Jorge Figueira   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

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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

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