Contemporary Architecture in Portugal

Contemporary architecture in Portugal has no agreed birth date. Its first recognisable signs emerge around 1950, when a new generation began to question both the monumentalism of the Estado Novo and the dogmatic application of the canons of the international Modern Movement. The Revolution of 25 April 1974 is, however, the most frequently cited landmark: the democratic transition multiplied public commissions, urban planning and social housing programmes, giving architects a broadened field of action. From this context emerged a body of work that, over the following decades, would win an international prestige improbable for a small, peripheral country.

The Porto School and continuity of place

The axis of this rise was the so-called Porto School, a current that formed around the city’s Higher School of Fine Arts and, later, the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto. Its tutelary figure is Fernando Távora, who rejected both historicist pastiche and the modernist tabula rasa. In their place he proposed a synthesis: to reconcile the functionality and economy of means of modernism with historical context, climate and the roots of Portuguese vernacular architecture, whose systematic survey would be recorded in the celebrated Inquérito à Arquitetura Popular em Portugal of the 1950s and 1960s.

This attention to place — to topography, to what is already there, to local materials — distinguishes the Portuguese tradition from many more self-referential international avant-gardes. Rather than a closed style, it is a method: each work responds to its specific site, extending an attitude inherited from modernism in Portugal and from the reaction against the ponderous architecture of the Estado Novo.

The most original trait of contemporary Portuguese architecture is not a formal repertoire but a discipline: the idea that form is discovered in the place, and not imposed upon it.

Two Pritzker Prizes

International recognition crystallised in two Pritzker Prizes, the highest distinction in the discipline. In 1992, Álvaro Siza Vieira became the first Portuguese architect to receive it; in 2011, Eduardo Souto de Moura, who had collaborated with Siza in the late 1970s, was the second. Both trained in Porto, and the fact that a single city should bring together two laureates is, in itself, a measure of the density of this architectural culture.

Siza’s work illustrates that coherence well: from the Portuguese Pavilion at Expo 98, with its celebrated concrete canopy suspended like a cloth over the square, to the Serralves Museum, inaugurated in 1999, the refinement of white forms is always in dialogue with the path and the light. Souto de Moura would carry the same exactingness to works such as the Braga Municipal Stadium, carved into a former quarry, demonstrating that the rigour of the Porto School could engage with large-scale programmes.

Contemporary plurality

To reduce current Portuguese architecture to the Porto School would, however, impoverish it. The following generation and the architects of Lisbon — among them Gonçalo Byrne and João Luís Carrilho da Graça — broadened the vocabulary into more varied registers, from minimalism to inflections of deconstructivism. The very opening of the country attracted works by foreign authors, such as the Casa da Música in Porto, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and inaugurated in 2005.

In the twenty-first century, the discipline increasingly intersects with environmental responsibility and with the rehabilitation of the existing, in permanent dialogue with the rest of the heritage addressed under periods and styles. More than a closed style, contemporary architecture in Portugal is defined by this plurality of generations active at the same time, united by a shared attention to design and to the territory.