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.

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'.

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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.

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Radical receptors

The political history of Portugal in the twentieth century has also done much to reinforce a deeply-entrenched conservatism. Spain was a conservative, Catholic, peasant country too, yet whereas Franco had his heroic mausoleums and the other claptraps of mid-century fascism, Salazar, dictator from 1932 to 1968, seems to have preferred a small-scale, sentimental, washed-out Classicism in his buildings, creating an effect in his public works rather as if Oliver Hill had sold his soul to Oswald Mosley. The selected architect for the 1937 Paris Exhibition, Keil do Amaral, produced a pavilion that nestled below Speer's like a toy poodle at the feet of an Alsatian, composed of elements not that different from Hill's nearby.

At Coimbra, for the university, Cottinelli Tembro did produce a Speeresque ensemble of flat, blind colonnades and right angles, but this was almost unique. Keil do Amaral's scheme for a gigantic Palace of Justice in Lisbon was unbuilt, but for its soaring pylons. When Modernism came along, Salazar adopted that too, building housing estates on Charter of Athens lines in the suburbs of Lisbon. Perhaps he was as indifferent as any other economist to what a building actually looks like. In fact, the most significant architectural legacy of the dictatorship is probably in the field of city planning, the creation of new boulevards on a Pombalist * scale around the capital.

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There are plenty of new voices in Portuguese architecture today. Contemporary architects are well served by local publishers, and books devoted to the local giants--in particular Siza and Souto de Moura--fill whole shelves. The great slanting harbour tower at Lisbon, by Goncalo Byrne (AR June 2002), is one recent reminder that the country may prove highly receptive to radical architectural ideas, and that Portugal is not only a state on the fringe of Europe, but also its frontier to the west and to the Americas.

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* The Marques de Pombal (1699-1782), responsible for rebuilding Lisbon on a heroic grid plan following the catastrophic earthquake of 1755.