As a new generation of architects and designers take charge, Portugal's ancient capital is emerging from a long deep freeze.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, the broad Ribeira das Naus esplanade overflowed with Lisboans. At one end of the waterfront park, a kiosk did a brisk business in Super Bock beer and fried croquettes. Couples sat on a terraced limestone "beach" abutting the Tagus River, while joggers trailed dogs on a walkway above the water. Soaring wire sculptures towered over hulking stone benches, and stalky trees grew out of curious plastic planters. On landscaped lawns pitched toward the river, towels and blankets formed a mosaic of sunbathers; behind them, blinding-white houses and terra-cotta roofs dominoed up the hillsides.
Later that evening, farther inland, a smartly dressed crowd filed into the Teatro Thalia for a violin concert, past four sphinxes guarding a neoclassical entrance of pale Lisbon limestone. The theater rose beyond it, a tawny concrete box wrapped on the ground level in black mirrored glass. Inside, the auditorium itself was enveloped by the ruins of an older structure: an irregular tumble of brick arches that surrounded the stage and the audience, like a crown held in place by reinforcing concrete.
Five years ago, none of this existed. Teatro Thalia's columns fronted the overgrown shell of the Count of Farrobo's private opera theater, inaugurated in 1843 and left to molder after a fire destroyed the building 20 years later. Along the riverfront, trash littered the rocky coastline. Such scenes of rot and ruin were hardly unique: The city council estimates that 12,000 of Lisbon's buildings—roughly 20 percent—sit in varying stages of decay.
Not for long, it would seem. In the next few years, the city will welcome a major art, architecture, and technology museum, dozens of restored and landscaped public squares, several high-rises, a sprawling new cruise terminal, and countless additional shops, studios, and cultural spaces.
The 2008 global economic crisis left Portugal's unemployment rate among college graduates at nearly 40 percent—a potentially devastating blow for Lisbon's burgeoning art and architecture scenes, and for a city then being touted as Europe's next design hub. But initiatives launched in the wake of the crisis and aimed at retaining and empowering local talent have begun to bear fruit. Once-stalled building projects and renovations are nearing completion. Local firms are subverting expectations with inventive, energetic results. Lisbon's foretold boom may have turned out differently than expected, but it's a boom nonetheless.
The Subvert Studio architecture and design firm's multidisciplinary team at a pavilion created for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
"We are interested in breaking with the visual cliché of traditional Portuguese architecture," Diogo Lopes told me in 2014. Warm and thoughtful, the Lisbon-born architect was a partner at Barbas Lopes Arquitectos, one of two firms behind the restoration of Teatro Thalia. He was appointed chief curator of this year's Lisbon Architecture Triennale before his recent death, at age 43, from cancer. "Portuguese architecture can be described cartoonishly as 'white architecture,' deliberately plain, relying on craftsmanship and heavy materials," Lopes said. He credited the persistence of these traits to their inherent quality, utility, and ease of use. Lopes's prescription for innovation, therefore, was to combine historic references with material experimentation, unorthodox thinking, persistence, and pragmatism. He had no interest in just changing the facades of otherwise traditional structures. "We've had to reclaim the right and the need to build this city, to intervene in the city on all its scales, not just with lightweight interventions," he said. And Lopes was not alone. For the last decade, a loose collective of local architects, along with a few foreigners, has been pushing the ancient city into the future.
At present, the skyline seems to hold as many cranes as cathedral spires. Much of the development is focused on two areas: the Tagus waterfront, in downtown Lisbon, and the suburb of Belém, which has become a culture hub. While many of these emerging structures make sly reference to the Portuguese vernacular, none of them will be remotely traditional, or deliberately plain.
One has already arrived: The new National Coach Museum, which opened in Belém last year, was designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Two galleries, set inside a massive white box, sit atop thick concrete columns and cubes of glass and steel. Da Rocha's spare architecture contrasts cheekily with the museum's centuries-old contents—velvet-and-silk carriages painted with cherubs and angels, their Baroque lines set against thin slashes of windows. Like so much of what's rising in Lisbon these days, the museum slings Old Portugal aggressively into the 21st century.
Across the road, the final touches are being added to the Museum for Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT), a soon-to-open cultural center funded by EDP, Portugal's electric company, and designed by English architect Amanda Levete's firm, AL_A. Levete has sheathed the museum in shimmery, fish-like ceramic scales, a clever reference to the tiles cladding so many of Lisbon's buildings and a visual corrective to the hulking brick turn-of-last-century power station next door. Low and curvaceous, MAAT's form calls to mind the back of a whale, or an especially voluptuous serpent emerging from the riverbank.
Back in Lisbon, up in the hills, the Palácio Sinel de Cordes similarly slams old and new together. The 18th-century palazzo—with its double-height ceilings, grand staircase, and faded murals—served as a primary school before it was abandoned in 2006. Six years later, the city lent it to the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, which, in partnership with a local design firm, has been renovating the space to provide offices for an architecture magazine, a design collective, and five other startups. A second phase of renovations will install a restaurant and bookshop in time for this year's Triennale in October.
That all this is happening just a few years after the economic crisis is perhaps surprising—and much of the architectural energy rippling through Lisbon today can be credited to a remarkably progressive and design-savvy city council. Architect Manuel Salgado, who along with Vittorio Gregotti conceived the Belém Cultural Center, one of Portugal's prized institutions, has served as deputy mayor and head of urban planning for about nine years. Under his leadership, the city has introduced tax breaks for building renovations, sponsored community-oriented design projects, and offered leasing grants for small businesses. These and other policies were intended in part to keep unemployed young architects and designers from fleeing for Brazil, northern Europe, or Dubai in search of jobs—and indeed, even as the bigger firms downsized, younger firms took the bait and stayed in town.
Conceptual artist Leonel Moura designed these planters, which double as seats, for Praça do Comércio Square.
The new generation is more open to creative integrations of disciplines—architecture and art, architecture and food, architecture and advocacy, architecture and performance—according to Triennale deputy director Manuel Henriques. "When you go into a field and there's no jobs in what you were trained for, you adapt," he told me. "The context forces you to make connections between different subjects." Today, Lisbon is blooming with collaborations and cross-pollinations. Local architecture firm Artéria teamed up with a group of activists in Mouraria, one of the city's poorest yet most historic neighborhoods, to renovate and restore a decrepit building. The resulting cultural space, Mouradia—all polished concrete and bright-blue paint—hosts free DJ classes for teens and draws the neighborhood's young artists for wine and Saturday-night concerts on the plaza outside. Meanwhile, a team of engineers and a designer founded Fruta Feia, a cooperative that's significantly cut down on food waste in Lisbon. And the shop Cortiço & Netos, run by four brothers who inherited the business from their grandfather, offers a line of design goods composed of vintage tiles from demolished buildings and defunct manufacturers.
Upriver from Belém's museums, ambitious projects on downtown Lisbon's waterfront are again moving forward after a recession-­induced hiatus. A pair of mixed-use towers by the award-winning local firm Aires Mateus opened last year, and work continues on the new cruise terminal and a surrounding park. Last year, a city-­sponsored competition put the winners in charge of renovating 31 plazas around Lisbon. And the heady list of design projects—be they grass-roots or starchitect-driven—goes on. There's even a new walkway up to the iconic Castelo de São Jorge, making the hilltop castle wheelchair-­accessible for the first time.
And yet the change is measured enough that Lisbon still looks like itself. Current architects are worldly, modern, and inventive, but Portuguese craftsmanship, materials, and history all remain central to their projects. Product lines like Cortiço & Netos's recontextualize traditional materials; new buildings nod to old.
Our friends at Pitchfork curated a playlist inspired by the city's beach bound trains, full of tender beach-friendly pop.