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View from Oporto

Architectural Review, The, July, 2004 by Catherine Slessor

Oporto is going to get its Guggenheim, in the shape of OMA's new Casa da Musica.

There is an old Portuguese expression: 'Coimbra studies, Braga prays, Lisbon shows off and Oporto works'. Industrious Oporto is definitely having a moment--its unglamorous, unfashionable and unfancied football team, F. C. Porto, won the European club championship in May, through an ethos of hard work, team spirit and a conspicuous lack of foreign superstars. The club also has a new ground, the 52 000 seat Estadio de Dragaos (Dragon Stadium) built as part of the wave of development for Euro 2004.

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Historically, Oporto's architectural scene has been notably devoid of foreign superstars, looking inwards instead to the more reticent, regional ambitions of the Oporto School, as embodied by Alvaro Siza, who is still very active both in Portugal and abroad, and his protege Eduardo Souto de Moura. Both occupy studios at 53 Rua do Aleixo, a typically unassuming office block designed by Siza in 1997, with breathtaking views across the river Douro, which has become the spiritual epicentre of modern Portuguese architecture (a bit like Foster and Rogers sharing the same premises).

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Yet Oporto is currently having a major brush with foreign superstardom in the shape of Rem Koolhaas whose mammoth Casa da Musica is emerging from a site in the well-heeled district of Boavista. Rem's lumpen homage to Marcel Breuer forms part of the splendidly named Praca Mouzinho de Albuquerque, a monumental roundabout dominated by a huge column topped with a lion decisively flattening an eagle to mark the joint Anglo-Portuguese triumph over the French in the Peninsular War. The Casa da Musica similarly goes for the jugular and is the biggest thing to happen to Oporto in a long time. There is wild talk that it will be the city's Bilbao Guggenheim, a showpiece project by a foreign superstar that will galvanize all sorts of tourist and cultural activity by putting this raffish, hardworking city, better know for its port lodges and picturesque Douro riverfront, on the weekend short-break map, as well as raunching up the Portuguese architectural scene.

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Koolhaas design for a 1200 seat concert hall was the outcome of a three-way international tussle between OMA, Dominique Perrault and Rafael Vinoly, with Eduardo Souto de Moura among the judges. Originally it was planned to be the centrepiece of Oporto's fiesta for the 2001 European City of Culture, but protracted work on the foundations and unpredictably dire weather conditions have conspired to seriously delay the programme and instead it will be completed this autumn. Still, the Oporto authorities have stuck with it, and their faith will certainly be rewarded by the blaring spotlight of international attention that the Koolhaas Factor will bring to the city (but like winning the lottery, this may turn out to be a mixed blessing).

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The Casa itself sits on a rather bleak new public plaza (distinct shades of Alphaville), that attempts to mediate between the different scales of the surroundings, from rather grand nineteenth-century wedding cake blocks to the smaller, scruffier backstreets. Poised on its plaza like a deformed meteorite, it exhibits the usual OMA tension between a wackily monumental exterior and fluidly informal interior. One issue Koolhaas seems not to have addressed is how the concrete exterior will weather--northern Portugal is one of the wettest parts of Europe, and with no apparent means of throwing the water off its bulk, the austere, angular surfaces will soon be streaked with grime and slime. It does happen - Fernando Tavora's exquisite stone and glass tower (completed only two years ago) in the precincts of the city's marvellous twelfth-century cathedral is now liberally and discouragingly streaked with green muck.

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Next to the Casa da Musica a new metro stop has been built to cope with the anticipated throngs of tourists and architectural groupies, but it also forms part of a wider extension and redevelopment of the city's metro system that is currently carving out large holes all over Oporto. The Casa's station has been designed by Eduardo Souto de Moura as a long, floating canopy penetrated by two drums--elegant, understated geometry that could not be further from Koolhaas's computer-generated posturing. Oporto's lively, cultivated architectural community is at present reserving judgement on the world's favourite architectural enfant terrible, but can see the wider benefits of the municipal ambition that has brought OMA to Oporto. 'The sons have too much respect for the fathers,' remarks Fatima Fernandes, principal in local firm Cannata & Fernandes, summing up the conservative quality of much Portuguese architecture that tends to always defer to its elder statesmen rather than revolt against them.

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This is gradually and inevitably changing, however. Cannata & Fernandes recently edited a mammoth monograph on the work of contemporary Portuguese architects (a new edition is due out later this year) and see the country's architecture as in a state of transition, with new ideas being introduced as the younger generation travel more widely and are exposed to a more eclectic range of influences. This is manifest in the work of practices such as Guedes deCampos, both graduates of Oporto's architectural school, whose sleek bar on the Douro riverfront (p60) is an exercise in industrial economy, and Lisbon-based ARX who have just completed a new regional blood centre in the north of the city (p66), which experiments with form and materials in a way that owes just as much to Eisenman and Libeskind as to Siza. How such exotic influences are absorbed, tempered and transmuted to forge a new contemporary regional identity promises to be highly intriguing, so in future it might be well worth taking a weekend short-break to a post-Koolhaas Oporto.