A new generation is finding its voice in Portugal.

EXIHIBITION/Overlappings: Six Portuguese Architecture Studios

RIBA, London

Until 2 July

www.architecture.com

London is having a Portugal moment. Following Alvaro Siza's RIBA Gold Medical scoop (AR April 2009), there's now a chance to see how the next generation of Portuguese architects is shaping up. Curated by Jonathan Sergison of London-based firm Sergison Bates, six practices are, literally, showcased in the airy confines of the RIBA. Models, photographs, videos and material samples are arrayed in large wooden flight cases, like giant cabinets of curiosities. It's fashionably austere - nothing on the walls - but this seems appropriate given the nature of the work its tone characterised by what Sergison describes as an absence of the rhetoric'.

Aires Mateus shows models of seven houses, all at the same scale, while lnes Lobo distils things down to just two video screens, meditating on the creative cannibalisation and reuse of old buildings. Bugio, the studio run by Joao Favila menezes and Pedro Domingos, presents a hotel on a coastal site, complete with pebbles scavenged from the beach. Perhaps the most compelling exhibit is Paulo David's pair of models, layered like mammoth millefeuilles, of an arts centre in Funchal, Madeira, and beautifully rustic constructions that enable tourists to visit lava caves in Sao Vincente.

Historically, Portuguese architecture is firmly rooted in the vernacular, with craftbased, artisanal origins and a limited range of forms and materials. Modernism has been an essentially liberating influence, nourished by the abstraction, sensitivity and social awareness of the Porto School, positioned at a crucial geographical and philosophical distance from the more state-sanctioned orthodoxy of Lisbon.

Today's emerging generation is able to draw on a much wider frame of reterence than was possible for its predecessors, with the advantage of being able to travel and study beyond Portugal. Many younger designers have spent time in the offices of the masters, which may account for the inherent conservatism that still touches much Portuguese architecture.

There are indications, however, that a new generation is starting to find its own voice, tempered and influences and general intellectual curiosity. This laconically presented, yet enthralling exhibition proof that things are moving on.

+ Exhibits are presented in 'cabinets of curiosities'

- Portuguese architecture is still reticent at heart