Material encounters: for reasons of history and economics, there is an especially intimate relationship between materials and Portuguese architecture that still encourages notions of a regional identity

Architectural Review, The, July, 2004 by Timothy Brittain-Catlin

Portuguese architecture has been consistently characterized over the last several hundred years by the remarkably placid nature of its forms and details. A highly limited palette has been reworked many times, almost to the extent that the process runs counter to the experience of most changing, modernizing countries. Whereas modernity is often heralded by the arrival in a small village of a new building marked with the sophistications of the big city, or a foreign education (as, for example, is the case across Ireland now), in Portugal, it often seems that it is the whitewashed character of simple village architecture that is increasingly making itself felt in the big cities, often at the hands of the country's leading architects. Whether the forms are drawn from the pitched roofs of the granite north, the orthogonal, colonnaded farmhouses of the centre, or the rendered, blocky, cabins of the south, the same features predominate--a very few windows; flat walls with a horizontal emphasis; a close connection to the earth; very little timber; reductive detailing and flush junctions; a sense of tightness, rather than enclosure. And, above all, the only true colour, heavenly blue, emanating from the intensity of the Iberian sky.

This may seem surprising because the words 'Portuguese architecture' tend to conjure up a vision of deep-coloured tiles, the kind that fill the facades of the houses that tourists see when visiting the southern parts of Lisbon. And yet these tiles, if anything, merely emphasize the flatness of the fronts, and their colours are rarely exploited. There are coloured limestones from the area around Sintra--rosy encarnado de negrais, and yellow amaretto de negrais but these usually end up as kitchen worktops for the domestic consumer. More exotic forms of vernacular decoration--in particular, the ornamental chimneys of historical buildings, especially in the Alentejo district east and south of Lisbon--are somehow forgotten. It emerges that the leading Portuguese building-trade export to Britain at the moment is, appropriately, the white enamelled steel bath.

The lack of international impact of all but a very few Portuguese architects and indeed building materials--has distinct historical and economic reasons. In general, local industry is characterized by a large number of small, almost craft-based, enterprises, each lacking the critical mass for expansion overseas. Productivity is low, and imports are limited by cost: steel, for instance, is rarely seen. The situation is changing, however, and economists and businessmen see the current period as a critical one. European Union grants have been directed at educating and training the construction industry labour force, and although there is a long way to go before the situation can be compared to that in northern Europe, it is now widely recognized that the country has been transformed over the last thirty years.

Conservative forbears

The result, in architectural terms, seems to be an increasing attempt at higher standards of workmanship, yet allied to a natural conservatism in the range of the forms and ideas. Looking back at prizewinning schemes over the last decade, this pattern can be clearly seen. In 1992, Eduardo Souto de Moura won the biannual Secil Architecture Award, sponsored by a major concrete manufacturer, for a cultural centre in Oporto. Then aged 40, Souto de Moura was regarded as a leading architect from a younger generation, and in his citation the chairman of the judges, Alvaro Siza, paid him an interesting compliment, writing that he knew of no one else 'willing and able to use such a vast range of materials, colours and textures in such a limited space'. And indeed, where the majority of short-listed architects submitted almost monochromatic, monotextured designs, Souto de Moura combined flat or almost flat walls of painted concrete, brick and granite; this was the extent of the 'vast range'.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Ten years later, the same architect was shortlisted for his residential building in the small town of Maia, just north of Oporto--this is the one entirely encased in aluminium venetian blinds, always photographed tightly shut, forming another homogeneous, impenetrable wall. In a recent cinema building in Oporto itself, he has adopted at least one of the few more recent mannerisms of Portuguese architecture--strange mooning windows which lurch out from the body of the building like eyes on stalks. Elsewhere, he uses another current mannerism, a thin bold frame wrapping itself around the long horizontal house, like a frame around a picture. Both these devices can be seen in several contemporary projects elsewhere.

Siza, too, is not above using these things, in his elegant way--he also has a cluster of mooning windows, on the roof of his Information Sciences Faculty at Santiago de Compostela (AR November 2000). This a smooth white rendered building, sitting above a plinth faced in equally smooth stone, another popular device and presumably derived from the vernacular of northern Portugal, where a light-weight structure, often of timber, sits on stone ground floor walls. For the most part, this is a hard, flat, somewhat secretive architecture--those mooning windows are, after all, often intended to raise the glass up and out of the way of the onlooker. So in formal terms, very little changes. Maybe the history of natural catastrophes in Lisbon--in particular, the great earthquake of 1755--has further encouraged an architecture of cautious defensiveness.