NowLisbon

Architecture

Architecture in Lisbon

Lisbon builds on seven hills and rebuilt its centre on a grid after the 1755 earthquake, so the city alternates between rigid planning and steep improvisation. Its recent architecture is concentrated on the river, where the port used to be.

• MAAT

  ·

  Completed 2016

  Amanda Levete

  A museum of art, architecture and technology beside a disused power station on the Tagus. Levete kept it low and gave it a curved roof the public walks over, so the museum works as a piece of the promenade before it works as a gallery. Fifteen thousand crackle-glazed tiles cover the surface, angled to throw river light back in pieces. Lisbon has tiled its buildings for centuries, and this uses the same material to make an object that reads as water.

• Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown

  ·

  Completed 2010

  Charles Correa

  A biomedical research centre on the river at Belém, a few hundred metres from the tower. Correa split the programme into two curved buildings and left the gap open to the water, so a public route runs through a working laboratory to a stone platform at the edge. The passage between the two is the part the city uses. The site is where the voyages left from, and the building's name takes the same subject in a later century.

• Gare do Oriente

  ·

  Completed 1998

  Santiago Calatrava

  An interchange built for Expo 98 on reclaimed industrial land, stacking trains, metro and buses on one site. Calatrava raised the platform canopy on steel columns that branch overhead into a lattice glazed only in the roof plane, so it reads as a canopy of leaves rather than a shed. The concrete concourse below is deliberately heavy and dim by comparison. It was the exposition infrastructure built to outlast the exposition, and it is why the district became somewhere people live.

• Portugal Pavilion

  ·

  Completed 1998

  Álvaro Siza

  The host country's pavilion for Expo 98, on the reclaimed riverfront. Siza hung a concrete canopy twenty centimetres thick between two heavy porticoes on steel cables, so the slab sags in the middle the way a sheet does when held at two edges. The ceremonial square it covers is otherwise empty. It is one structural idea carried out at full size, and it has served as a public square ever since.

• Belém Tower

  ·

  Completed 1519

  Francisco de Arruda

  A fortified tower at the mouth of the Tagus, built as a gun platform and a ceremonial gate. Arruda set a low bastion projecting into the water against a four-storey keep, then covered both in Manueline carving: rope mouldings, armillary spheres, and a rhinoceros taken from an animal that had recently reached Lisbon alive. The military and the decorative parts are the same stone. It was the last thing leaving ships saw, and the first thing returning ones did.