Sinopsis

Architecture has been one of Portugal's most optimistic cultural indicators during the final few decades of the last century and goes on being one of the most hopeful signs for its future. The emergence on the Portuguese panorama of Álvaro Siza and his discovery by foreign critics led to the still-extant convention of positing the country's architectural output as falling between the lyricism of the so-called 'Porto School' and the professional pragmatism of Lisbon. Yet the Portuguese scene of recent years can no longer be understood as being based on this duality: the openness of society in general and of architects in particular -via the creation of new schools, academic exchanges with the outside world and the proliferation of magazines- has led to an extending of the frames of reference which does not exclude tradition itself.



Included in this volume are 25 works of differing scales and typologies created by diverse generations of Portuguese architects over the last five years, works which, preceded by a text by Ana Vaz Milheiro, offer an 'open and inclusive' portrait of an architecture in the throes of transformation and consolidation vis-à-vis a far more diversified new reality. Discussed by Nuno Grande, the publication of the Music Box in Porto by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas functions as a kind of epilogue in conversation with the Portuguese buildings.