Libraries and University Buildings

In Portugal, learning had an architecture of its own. This typology brings together the buildings designed for teaching, studying and keeping books — universities, colleges and historic libraries —, a group set apart from the rest of the civic heritage by the intellectual vocation that gave it form. Where the cloister of a convent served prayer, the university courtyard served academic disputation; and where the church preserved relics, the library preserved manuscripts and printed books. From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, these spaces were laboratories of stone in which the idea was tested that knowledge deserved to be sheltered, ordered and handed down.

The university as a city of study

For centuries, the history of this typology merges with that of a single institution. The University of Coimbra was born as a Studium Generale by a charter of King Dinis in 1290 and remained itinerant between Lisbon and Coimbra until King João III settled it definitively, in 1537, in the former royal palace of Coimbra’s Alta. There the Paço das Escolas was installed, a nucleus that still today brings together the Sala dos Capelos, the Via Latina and the Chapel of São Miguel, layering Gothic, Manueline, Mannerist, Baroque and Pombaline styles within a single built organism. In 2013, this ensemble — including the Alta and the Rua da Sofia — was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

The university was never a single building, but a quarter. Around it grew dozens of colleges, houses where scholars lived and studied in community. The Colégio de Jesus, founded by the Society in 1542 and built from 1547, was the largest; with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759, its church would become, in 1772, the Sé Nova de Coimbra. The Rua da Sofia, in turn, aligned a series of sixteenth-century colleges along one of the first planned university avenues in Europe.

Before public libraries existed, the book lived cloistered: in monasteries, universities and colleges. The passage from the religious collection to a collection open to the nation is one of the great cultural turning points of eighteenth-century Portugal.

The library as strongroom and as theatre

Before printing, the monastic library was the reservoir of written knowledge, and the Monastery of Santa Cruz, in Coimbra, gathered one of the most remarkable scriptoria of the realm. But the supreme expression of this typology is Baroque. The Joanina Library, commissioned by King João V and completed in 1728, was conceived simultaneously as a strongroom and as a theatre of knowledge: its walls more than two metres thick and its shelves of rosewood, gilded and lacquered in black, red and green, enclose some sixty thousand volumes from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It is one of the summits of Portuguese Baroque architecture, where cabinetmaking, painting and conservation engineering merge into a single work.

From the Enlightenment to the public library

The Pombaline reform of 1772 reorganised studies and endowed the university with new scientific facilities — cabinets, a chemistry laboratory, an astronomical observatory —, transforming the university building into an instrument of modern science. In the same Enlightenment movement, the idea of the library opened up to society. In 1805, Archbishop Dom Frei Manuel do Cenáculo founded the Public Library of Évora, bequeathing it a collection then estimated at around fifty thousand volumes and uniting, in a single project, library and museum as instruments of progress.

The suppression of the religious orders in 1834 accelerated this transition: thousands of conventual manuscripts and printed books passed to the State and fed public and academic libraries throughout the country. Thus the arc of this typology is completed — from the book kept under lock and key to the book offered to common reading —, and with it the long companionship between the typology of scholarly buildings and the intellectual history of Portugal.