ABSTRACT VISIONS (*)

The reality of Portuguese architecture is a lot more fragmented today than it was a few years ago. Instead of discussing what Portuguese architecture is, it makes sense to mention the production of Portuguese architects whose diversity increased in the last decade. However, it is still a production with strong connections to vernacular architecture, which is understandable in a country where architecture possesses an unusual beauty, from the traditional granite bloc houses in the north, to the abstract white volumes in the south. I think the linkage is extraordinarily important in times where, due to globalization, borders fade, local specificities weaken and cultures fall to a poorer, homogeneous “bouillon”.Simultaneously, the environment of Portuguese architecture has become more open to the exterior, in part due to the circulation of students and young architects through other countries of great importance in this field ( Spain, Switzerland, USA, Holland…), due to fast access to worldwide publications and, in instant time, through Internet. On the other hand, conferences of foreign architects and thinkers in Portugal became more frequent and it is also true that many Portuguese architects travel abroad to participate in exhibits, seminars and conferences.The extremely interesting result of these two realities is clearly visible when travelling across our country, as I did while producing 26 architecture programs for a private television station similar to CNN, Sic Notícias.Therefore, I believe my best contribution would be to invite you to follow me on a trip across Portuguese architecture, from north to south and the islands; a visit to 11 small buildings, mostly designed by relatively young architects (35-45 years old). I don’t pretend the choice is necessarily the best, but I keep from all those pieces of architecture a strong impression.I deliberately left out some internationally famous authors, such as Álvaro Siza and Souto de Moura, in order to be able to reveal the extraordinary potential of many others who, even if unknown abroad, assure a promising future to our architecture. Besides the ones included in my text, many others are of equivalent value, and, fortunately, with different understandings of architecture, such as, Contemporânea and Búgio offices in Lisbon, or Cannatà & Fernandes, and Serôdio, Furtado & Associados in Oporto, to mention only a few.

AFIFE
Vernacular architecture in Minho possesses a specific weight and sense of permanence which, maybe due to the use of robust blocs of granite, the typical stone of that mountainous landscape, give it a strong sense of belonging to the place. On the other hand, this house in Afife, composed by three parallelopipedons placed along the south limiting wall, appears almost out of context, with a strange lightness and an apparently transitory or ephemeral character. It is as if we were before a couple of containers temporarily placed there.
Sitting in front of me in his office, with drawings of the house on the desk, Nuno (Brandão Costa) surprised me. That architecture was born precisely from his interest for the traditional houses of Minho, often fragmented in several volumes: housing, livestock, maze cellars, etc. To reinforce the connection between the house and the rural surroundings, he used mostly manufactured materials: irregular blocs of stone as external pavement, wood extracted from sleepers inside, exposed concrete, wood joinery and black pigment impregnated plaster walls.
It’s a house that suggests a cosmopolitan life style, though echoes of that rural imaginary appear to us in ways which are neither direct nor obvious.
I believe the main quality of this house lies within its apparent paradoxes.

ALVITE
In this intensely vegetated mountainous territory is situated the narrow and long plot of land – some kind of canal between the oak-trees – where Álvaro Siza, son of the famous architect Álvaro Siza Vieira, designed an oblique house.
The irregular morphology of the ground and a south facing view towards a magnificent landscape are at the origin of this architecture.
A.S. proposed some sort of giant stairway connecting the south end to the north facing top end, where the entrance is. Along the western side of the plot, two juxtaposed stairways (one internal, the other external), allow us to go from top to bottom outside and inside the house, which is why this is a kind of house-way.
The partially underground nature of the house crosses an equally oblique landscape provoking on the four sides different formal expressions, none recognizable as the image of a house: on the south side, through the rotation of volumes, the architect attempts to frame privileged views of the horizon; on the north side, we could almost distinguish a delta planer or a belvedere. In this point, I entered the house through a crack, as if I was sliding into the depths of the ground; the dominating landscape disappears and we start discovering an almost labyrinthic and dellusional interior reminding us of  Piranesi or Escher. Occasionally, a window frames a particular view of the landscape. Gradually the initial disquiet becomes peace.
The social area – kitchen, living room, dinning room – is a levelled platform, imperceptible from the exterior, which conveys the necessary stability for a comfortable through disquiet life.
Back to the exterior, the artisanal roughness of the house´s concrete seems almost natural in the rural surroundings. In its texture one can distinguish the glow of mica stone, present in the surrounding ground.
Among the trees, the house emerges like a scintillating telluric mass.

ÉVORA
There is a house in Évora, by João Trindade, whose design departed from mere practical necessities and evolved into an alegory around two characters.
This is a rather uncommon argument constructed by an architect and an artist.
The existing house had been built through the years with no real project, under the supervision of the owner who directly instructed builders. Gradually, the house took shape and predictable problems appeared: low architectural and constructive quality and excess of area.
The project to legalize the house would start as a process of subtraction: defective roofs became flat roofs; unnecessary rooms were transformed into voids or spaces opened to the exterior; the central living room with no natural light was converted into a patio. The perimeter of the house was redefined as a simple parallelopipedon from which solid masses were extracted.
The black paint on two of those empty spaces emphasizes the shade and prepares an ambiguous scenario, where the perception of the visitor wonders between the recognizable vestiges of the old house and its actual lines. These spaces also work both as sheds on the south and west sides where the sun is more intense and as resting areas facing the swimming pool and the woods.
The artist Fernanda Fragateiro found in L'attente l'Oubli by Maurice Blanchot  the parallel she was looking for and which reflects the double nature of the house: the characters of the book are at the same time two people and a single one. F.F. imprinted throughout the house quotes of the book, insinuating the alegoric relation with mystery, ambiguity and a clear cinematographic sense: the characters wonder around the house, relating to it, talking to each other, to themselves and in some way to us. We can feel the story while going through the spaces, while reading fragments of the book, here and there, sometimes clearly, others with almost subliminar subtlety... like in small engravings in wood or in black paint on black walls.
The fascination for shadows of trees projected on the house led F.F. to propose a figurative representation of those shadows on parts of the house, thus fixing the movement of the light. She did not do it in an obvious way, on white walls; she did it on black walls, giving the supporting plane a surprising depth.

SASSOEIROS
The black glass panels of the Trafic Control Centre, designed by João Luis Carrilho da Graça, Flávio Barbini e Maria João Barbini, can induce those who see them to think they're normal glass façades. However, a closer look reveals that they're not transparent as in fact they are masive solar panels. This is the main asset of this building.
Many high-tech buildings I know of are nothing but superficial technological exibitionist pieces. On the other extreme we have buildings where the technological paraphernalia is voluntarily dissimulated.
Sassoeiros is none of those. It is different. It is an example of sustainable architecture based on the extensive use of photovoltaics, which cover three sides of the building and the rooftop. What most architects would try to hide, the panels, is the main theme of composition of this project. The panels are used unframed and onto each one the architect has juxtaposed a glass surface. The result is a vitreous skin where technology appears with subtlety and ambiguity. It also works as a u-shell which protects the interior from the intense noise of the highway. The open end of the U is oriented against the highway. A volcanic stone wall enables a single entrance to the building, through a single door. Crossing it is like passing through an accoustic filter to a patio, an unexpected oasis where vegetation grows from a water surface. This is the first of the two most significant spaces - a little natural world which appears as an alternative to the artificial environment found in the basement.
When we get down to the dark control room we can see operators observing in the twilight a giant canvas with several images captured in different points of the highway. A second spiral canvas, proposed by the artist Gilberto Reis, wraps the room with images of distorted natural elements, a sort of exterior and inaccessible world.
For a moment I recall the secretive scenarios of 007, where criminal associations complot to dominate the world.

ANTES
In urban terms, Antes is structured from a central street which ends in a square. From that main street depart other streets and houses which rapidy dissolve in the rural context.
It was in Antes (in portuguese before) that I found a little house, of illusional simplicity, which can easily throw down one of the most deplorable sophisms: architecture is only affordable by high society.
This house was designed by José Paulo dos Santos and built by a young mason and his assistant.
Severe financial constraints, a street with no references, a narrow and long land plot and the legal distances imposed on its perimeter have reduced the house to a longitudinal bloc in the centre of the plot reflecting the use of local techniques and patterns.
Working from the simplest archetype: one storey volume with pitched roof, the house is a sort of red clay container made of brick walls and floor and a clay-tiled roof, which enclose the white stucco interior. On the façade the door-window type is repeated 11 times.
The architect would tell me that he reflected upon modern domestic space related to vernacular typologies. In fact, his work is a synthesis of the social nucleus, the embryo of the primitive shelter where the fire on the floor would be used to cook and heat up the place. Through time new enclosures were added to the central nucleus so that people could store food, agricultural tools and animals.
This process of syntheis and addition is evoked through a modular logic centred in a nucleus which contains the social programmes and the fire, the fireplace and a stove.
The compacted and serial character of this house reminds me of Modern research on existezminimum: following a modular approach, the result is a inhabitational module which can be transposed to other contexts, mass-produced, thus enabling a more democratic use of qualified architecture.

ALENQUER
The house designed by the Aires Mateus brothers in this little town just a few kilometers away from Lisbon is one of their first projects with a deep concern for abstraction in architecture, a theme which they have been developing until present day. The work is a radical thus extraordinarily coherent reflection where there seems to be no room for cultural and lifestyle concessions.    
What many people would approach as a conventional conversion of a ruined house was transformed into an exercise around the concepts of limit and time. The house is also a game of opposites: external planes often become internal and vice-versa. Sometimes both things happen simultaneoulsy.
Only the thick walls marking the limits of the preexistent house were preserved. After some punctual geometrical corrections, the form resulting was a kind of enclosure divided in two parts. In the first one they put the pool (or “tank”, the puritan designation common to many Portuguese architects), in the other they built a new volume, corresponding to the minimum possible matter between  the modules of the different rooms. In other words: the volume-house results from the direct association of the volumes of the rooms. The residual space between this new volume and the old walls, entirely paved in wood, is the “revelation” of this project. It is an inhabitable and multisided external space, simultaneously tense and peaceful which mediates between two periods of the house’s life, the walls and the object.
According to Heiddeger, this is the ‘space between forms’. A space that materializes the concept investigated by the architects: an external limit of variable thickness, both in geometric and perceptive terms.

CASA DAS MUDAS
From the beach of Calheta one can see the dramatic perimeter of the island of Madeira. On top of the cliff , the natural roughness of the land seems suddenly ordered. Is it natural or artificial? Is it landscape or architecture? We are in the new extension of the Casa da Cultura da Calheta, known as Casa das Mudas (Mute House). It was named after the old building's owners, who were mute.
The concept at the origin of this project of Paulo David is a fusion of architecture, landscape, topography and geology. The ambition of the architect was to redesign a mountainous mass where the building would integrate the topography, as if it was a rocky outcrop. To achieve the effect, the exterior cladding is in natural local stone, sawed basalt.
The new volumes fit into the ground and work as a platform where the pre-existing house stands.
Green ridges on the roof top confirm the ambiguity between the artificial character of the architecture and the natural expression of the landscape.
We can find the first type of interiority when we go down to the spaces between the different blocs of the building, where the atmosphere is dominated by the blue sky and dramatic view points to the sea. The centre of those spaces is a large patio with a Botero sculpture seemingly marking the origin. All volumes around correspond to semi-autonomous areas, with independent entrances: the module of educational services, the souvenir shop, the exhibition module and the auditorium.
Entering the building we realize, through different paths proposing a descent to the centre of the mountain or a route to the sea, one of the strongest aspects of this architecture - its intense spatial pulse. Room after room, one discovers a new spatial configuration which is perceptively surprising. There are no rooms alike.
Sometimes, in our route of contemplation, the art work is replaced by an impressive view over the landscape.

AZORES
From my visit to the auditoria of the University Campus of Ponta Delgada, I can only recall some fragmented memories, sparse but impressive.  As in a movie where some middle episodes are missing, there are moments from which I retain only the essential.
Walking up the Campus, through a romantic atmosphere of lush trees, the diagonal view is broken by some recent buildings, opaque and dull, with a dubious territorial impact.
Further ahead, though, the building I invite you to visit is precisely the opposite. Inês Lobo and Pedro Domingos designed a building with a strong territorial sense. If the functional program is composed by tendentiously opaque spaces (auditorie), it is paradoxically a permeable building and, in essence, transparent.
The architects took advantage of the ground's inclination, more accentuated transversally, to place the grand auditorium. On the public roof top or square there’s only one protruding volume, the stage box . On the opposite side, there’s a long transparent solid,where the entrance is, and which connects the different parts of the building; the grand auditorium and two small amphitheatres that, as two large tubes in portico, rise above the square, allowing to see beneath.    This building is a puzzle articulated with enormous precision, where the architects played with visual permeability and the power of an extensive territoral perception, far beyond the limits of the building.
Two years past, my memory of these abstract white, black and glass volumes, behind which grow centenary trees in an apparently endless field, remain incredibly accurate.

GAIA
The work of the office Menos é Mais (Less is More) has some points of contact with portuguese architectural culture though it approaches other fields of research .
One of the projects by Menos é Mais, a riverside bar on the Gaia margin of the Douro, is a coherent expression of their work. As implied in their logo, they use the strictly essential, that is, a restrictive universe of compositional elements.
A friend taught me that, in television, each sentence should include one idea only. I understood, through the programmes I produced and presented, the intense aesthetic value of a simple sentence, precise in content and very efficient in terms of message. I believe Cristina and Francisco are looking for the same in architecture, may be with greater success than me in the field of communication and tv.
There is in their work a recurrent effort of abstraction and an investigation on mass construction processes, sometimes heavy (pre-fabricated concrete), others light, with deliberate connections to industrial design, as in the present example.
In this project they enter the universe of metallomechanic industry, associated with the production of train carriages. The proposal has the form of two containers articulated by bellows, where the services are located in the opaque small module cladded in alluminium sheets and the lounge is located in the long module, made of smoked glass framed by alluminium. In the second container, during the day, the intense reflection of the urban surroundings on this strange object emphasizes its sophistication whilst hiding those looking behind the glass. During the night the effect is the reverse, it irradiates light and exposes the interior. There is no apparent border between outside and inside.
Seating down for dinner I feel that, at any moment, the bar will move somewhere else.

CORTEGAÇA
The large experience of João Mendes Ribeiro in the conception of ephemeral objects, in particular scenarios for dance and theatre performances is one of his famous assets. These are generally object-scenarios, transformable by the interaction of actors and dancers, sometimes recycled from one performance to another. This experience strongly marks his work, even when the commission refers to permanent sets. As I see it, every single one of his works reflects on the relation between permanent and ephemeral. When I visited the small house in Cortegaça, the feeling was there.The commission consisted in the conversion of a ruined straw loft into a guest house which should then be connected to the main house – an uninteresting one, as it were.The project reveals the usual sharpness of João, who evaluated what is structural, the nature and compositional value of building systems in this old rural construction. He made a very rigorous survey of what existed there and initiated the composition by excluding both the superfluous and the irrecoverable. He did what I have seen him doing before: he used the traditional techniques he found and created a contemporary language with them. He produced something that retains his reading of the straw loft: precarious additions under the form of wooden panels creating the illusion of the inesxistence of windows and giving the whole object an abstract look. On the other hand, he was interested in the collision between the masonry in schist and the lightness of wood.He designed a new façade in wooden strips where the windows and main door are not perceptible though they are both present. The juxtaposed red tiles of the rebuilt roof, the new wood and the old schist produce an abstract volume with a subtle but intense vibration of textures and different times.Inside, a double-height ceiling and a mezzanine in the living room introduce an urban reference even if, paradoxically, elements of the roof's rural structure are still visible. During daylight the landscape around is perceived in vertical stripes through the façade batten. Diagonal lines of light cross the living room. At night, it all reverses.

ALCOBAÇA
The history of the Cistercian Monastery of Alcobaça begins with the promise of first King of Portugal, D. Afonso Henriques, to build it if he conquered the city of Santarém to the Moors.
The construction was initiated in 1153 and centuries of transformations, successive cultural, political and social realities, are present in the main façade, where the primitive gothic of the entrance portico is crossed with renaissance and baroque motives.
During the 20th century, the visit of Queen Elizabeth II and the intensity of traffic, were the reason for some restauration works in the surrounding area in a outdated pseudo-neo-baroque style. The main national road that was passing by D. Pedro V  street (against the building), would be absurdly lifted, cutting by half windows and doors. The monastery seemed hostage of the surrounding traffic and degradation progressively separated it from the city.
In the 90’s the project to recover the building including the urban surroundings was commissioned to Gonçalo Byrne. He was helped by João Pedro Falcão de Campos and with their usual perceptive maturity and the necessary obstinate ethics they defeated the opposition from shopkeepers who wanted the tourist buses stopping at their doors.
They removed the traffic and lowered D. Pedro V street to it’s normal level, recovering the proportions of the building and allowing to re-establish some truncated connections with the interior of the Monastery. The idea was simple: increasing porosity between the city and the monastery in order to revitalize it. They demolished the neo-baroque constructions in front on the main façade and reinvented the idea of  the former yard, a civic space, polifunctional, where civic and cultural manifestations may happen spontaneously. They drew in the field a series of stone lines, which are in fact water drains, crossing pavements of crisp-brown hardcore. They also decided to plant a small grove of oak-trees in front of the south wing.
The fundament of the work is simple but profound: to rehabilitate the spirit and austerity of Portuguese Cistercian architecture. The aim is achieved by using essential raw materials: light, water, earth, stone and trees.
The intense noise of cars I saw there once was replaced by the sound of running water, leaves on the trees moved by the wind and the bells jingling.
Little by little, the Monastery is now returned to the city.


(*) José Mateus, To World Architecture magazine nº 188