The new Church of Blessed Maria Restituta is located in the central part of the Brno Lesná housing estate, surrounded by the characteristically tall and predominantly slab shaped apartment buildings. It’s impossible for a church to compete with the size of these houses, so the choice was to make it visually simple, easy to read, elementary in its geometry. This is where it surpasses the surrounding housing blocks, standing out on a different level. The design is based on the urban context governed by straight lines and a firm logic, and shaped by its immediate neighbor, the existing religious center. The floorplan of the church has a shape of a circle, symbolizing Heaven and Eternity. Heaven is reflected back in the colorful horizontal window, making a ring around the top of the building, bringing in rainbow-colored natural light.

The photography series shows Álvaro Siza, the most prominent portugese architect, at work, during lectures, meeting clients or travelling to visit his projects. Thanks in part to the multitude of his built work which is winning him awards all over the world, including the Pritzker prize in 1992 (for rebuilding the area of Chiado in Lisbon), and in part to his influence over the young generation as a university professor, Siza has developed something of a cult following in the architectural community. The portraits, however, aim to show the man behind the public persona. An architect still working despite his 87 years of age, still searching, contemplating, exploring and creating.

School of Porto was a Portuguese movement that produced echoes in the architectural production to the present day. This paper presents an analysis of the production of two groups of Portuguese architects, considering features such as: job history, mentoring others architects, professional qualification, and descriptions of their work. The first formed by Fernando Távora, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura; the second formed by João Carrilho da Graça, Nuno Brandão Costa, the brothers Nuno and José Mateus, and the brothers Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus.

São João de Deus, the middle-class neighbourhood originally built in the 1940s, is typically associated with the architectural model known as “Soft Portuguese,” which the old fascist regime adopted as a stylistic dogma for public buildings of the period. Over time, particularly during the last three decades, the neighbourhood has undergone dramatic alterations. Its original character has been lost, the unique urban and typological qualities have changed, and anarchist and informal constructions have caused serious residential and social damage. In the first phase of the revitalisation, a series of new residential buildings completes the social housing district that was never finished. In the second phase, the existing buildings are subjected to a series of restoration interventions and upgraded to meet the needs of contemporary life.

Two buildings with similar appearances, one long, the other short. Six housing units – four identical and two exceptional – around one common garden, hidden inside a city block. One architecture uniting the fragmented reality. The composition of each inner space combines orthogonal, diagonal and curved lines. On the outside, the houses define a continuous colonnade framing a collective garden where it becomes impossible to discern where each apartment begins or ends.

In an interview with a Lisbon based architect of Czech origins and a Prague based architect of Portuguese origins, we reveal a little bit of the beauty and mystery of Portuguese architecture. We remember certain natural and political events and discuss their effects, we visit the schools of Porto and Lisbon and their famous professors, and finally we contemplate architecture’s place in the world and the role of the architect in society today.

A curious group of seven concrete blocks now forms the shorter side of a small square in Lousada, near Porto. While looking like a giant set of dice someone might have left there, they actually form a local museum of the Romanesque. The assorted mixture of volumes and heights represents the diverse generative character of romanesque architecture. The blocks are arranged around a central space referencing the twisting medieval alleys, while the austere concrete finish showing timber formwork texture is a unifying feature for the entire building.

Faced with the boundless extent of the Alqueva lake, the house requires a centre: a protected courtyard embracing the water. It uses the terrain to cast a dome that covers the social areas and is the life centre of the house. An inverted dome intersects it and creates an opening that lights the space, shaping its precise geometry and limits. The bedrooms open onto circular patios. Amid a wide, natural landscape, the scale of the house is that of the patios and superior dome. They are the sole visible elements, painted in radiant white.

Located on the Tejo riverside in Lisbon, the new residential building with high standard apartments fills a vacancy in a city block with two fronts of very different nature. Its southern part sits on the Boavista landfill in the flat part of the city. To the north, it faces the Calçada Marquês de Abrantes, a sloping hillside street created here by the Pombaline reconstruction plan after the earthquake in 1755. The project solves this special urban situation by transitioning from a conventional set of two separate buildings with smooth modern facades looking south, to a single building with two Pombaline regulated fronts looking north. Filling a vacant lot in an exceptionally long city block in the historic district, the project proposes a covered public outdoor passage providing a new direct access to the lower level of the city. A set of stairs, like so many others that characterize historic Lisbon.

Provocative is a series of art interventions in the public space that interact with the urban fabric and street furniture, presenting a new and critical look at current society. Addressing various subjects, such as pollution, exploitation of women, media sensationalism, connectivity and control, excessive manufacturing and consumption which lead to the continuous production of garbage and, consequently, the destruction of the Earth, these small, ephemeral interventions seek to be a vehicle for communication and awareness through art.