This impact assessment study of the redevelopment process in Municipal Districts within the scope of the PRR aims to analyze and evaluate the results achieved by the ongoing redevelopment processes in the Municipal Districts. The study covers three areas: Condado, in the parish of Marvila, Padre Cruz, in the parish of Carnide (1989-1995), and Sargento Abílio, in the parish of Benfica (1998-2001). Each case study corresponds to different municipal housing development programs.

The proposal analyzes the international networks in which Spanish architecture participated between 1976 and 2006, with the aim to disseminate contributions, results and expanding its field of action. The research will focus on the travel of ideas, commissions, teaching invitations, publications, exhibitions, conferences and personal contacts that enriched the national production and contributed to its development and dissemination in the aforementioned period. A period characterized by the promotion of public and private architecture built by notable architects, both new projects and heritage refurbishment, which, together with economic growth and private investment, fostered Spanish production to become a landmark for global contemporary practice, especially in its nearest sphere: Europe and the Americas. The international scene turned out to be particularly sensitive to all these experiences, which, endorsed by a new generation of critics, historians and the media, served to build and transmit an image of the modernity of democratic and decentralized Spain. Since this research aims at studying a very extensive and complex set of international networks, the dimension of the results calls for a coordinated proposal divided into two projects with two research teams. Each team will deal with the specificity of each geographical area (Europe or the Americas), defined by its peculiar context, both political-cultural and disciplinary, which allows us to investigate the reception of Spanish production determined by different interests, subjects and scales. The coordinated option also allows comparative studies to be carried out, enriching the final project results. In short, the coordinated proposal is articulated in three large sections, which affect both networks and media in the European and American contexts: 1. DIFFUSION NETWORKS AND MEDIA CHANNELS, which encompass the construction of a narrative and an imaginary, the creation of interpersonal alliances and an activ...

The general aim of this project is to study the transformations in Siza’s collective housing over the past 5 decades, focusing on the linked analysis of: a) the projects (social and private housing) and the respective social and urban condition framework; and b) their residents and the relationships they develop with the projected space. The research follows an intensive methodology: comparative study of 3 Siza’s cases/collective housing projects. Each represents a moment on the architect’s professional life and corresponds to a moment in the life of society and the city; the 3 together, and their temporal sequence, represent (part of) Siza’s trajectory and that of contemporary society and of the city. The cases are: 1. Bouça/Porto - started following the 1974 revolution. Symbolising the Revolution, Architecture and the Right to the City when it was in decay; 2. Terraços de Bragança – Chiado, Lisboa, started in the 1990s. Symbolising the national real estate boom, modernization launch and procrastination of urban renaissance; 3. Building 611 West 56th Street – Hell’s Kitchen, New York, began in the 2010s. Symbolising hyper-globalisation, the rise of the city, financialisation of real estate and the incontestability of the value of architectural authorship. The greatest innovation in the proposal is in the temporal sequence of the 3 cases, which allows us to answer the following questions: what has changed in the production and appropriation of Siza’s houses and how do these changes relate to social transformations and the architect’s career? Who promoted the housing at the different times, locations, to what end and for whom? What are the formal, functional and contextual differences/similarities between the projects? How have transformations in the urban context impacted on the occupation of dwelling in social, use and value terms? What is the social profile of residents, their evolution and differences between cases? How do these residents live in Siza’s houses? W...

Following the ICOMOS study “The World Heritage list: filling the gaps – an action plan for the future” and the Global Strategy of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee (WHC) encouraging State Parties to submit nominations on the 20th century Heritage, ICOMOS-Portugal presented an Ensemble of works of Álvaro Siza for the World Heritage (WH) Tentative List, in 2017.  Siza is not only an Architect of national relevance, but also international; as one can count the design of approximately 500 projects and built works (spread across 4 continents and 16 countries), more than 100 distinctions and awards, 19 PhDs Honorary degrees, hundreds of dedicated publications. Despite the international recognition of the quality of Siza’s architecture, there is not yet a complete and systematic inventory of his built works. The information is usually scattered, partial or incomplete. The existent literature focuses more on formal questions of the project, and little on the constructive and technical dimension of his works, on the state of conservation of the buildings, or on possible threats affecting them. In this framework, the scope of SizaATLAS project is to address a comprehensive inventory of all of Siza’s built works, and to develop a detailed documentation and analysis of the 18 buildings selected for the WH List. This research and the comparison with other contemporary architecture will result in a better understanding of the unique value of Siza’s architecture, in a national and international context. This will be key to establish the justification of the Oustanding Universal Value (OUV) of his work, its national protection and an effective management system to support the instruction of Siza’s works nomination for the WH List. The research intends to develop: 1) a COLLABORATIVE PLATFORM for open access, which will allow database management and exchange, as well as forms' compilation and research dissemination; 2) a georeferenced INVENTORY of all the built works by Siza, ...

The research project 'The Critical Monumentality of Álvaro Siza – Projects of Urban Renovation after the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition' aims at identifying, characterising, debating, and reflecting upon the works of Álvaro Siza, within the context of the urban policies launched in Portugal in the early 2000s. This research project ‘The Critical Monumentality of Álvaro Siza – Projects of urban renovation after the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition' seeks to articulate the relationships produced by urban interventions and buildings upon the specific contexts they engage with. The distinctive feature of this project is as a critical analysis of the idea of monumentality in Álvaro Siza’s works. Three overlapping analytical focal themes will be used as methodology: territory, urban and architectural culture, and social impact of interventions. For the purposes of this research, from the study cases - Portugal Pavilion of Expo’98 (1998), Atlantic Park in Vila do Conde (2005), Leça da Palmeira waterfront in Matosinhos (2007), Municipal Library in Viana do Castelo (2008) and Nadir Afonso Contemporary Art Museum in Chaves (2015) - will be drawn a comparative hypotheses in order to measure the impact of the project and the architectural culture resulting from these experiences. Comparative assessments will also be made with other Álvaro Siza projects that were part of similar urban renovation initiatives, carried out after other major events from the last decade of the 20th century, e.g. the Meteorology Centre in Barcelona (1992) designed for the Olympic Games, and the Hannover Pavilion projected for the 2000 World Exposition, and actually rebuilt in Coimbra, in central Portugal, in the course of the Polis programme for that city.

The research project called 'Grand Projects - Architectural and Urbanistic Operations after the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition' aims at identifying, characterizing, debating, and reflecting the urban policies and architectural works produced in Portugal after the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition (Expo98). The study is grounded on the conviction that the effects of this 'urban laboratory' cannot dispense a predominantly analytical and interpretative work, capable of mapping and qualifying the urban, projectual, and technological culture implemented in Portugal in the two decades that followed the Expo98 ventures. In 2008, a decade past over the Lisbon Exposition, the Lisbon Municipality presented its 'General Plan for Waterfront Interventions' (Plano Geral de Intervenções da Frente Ribeirinha - PGIFR), aiming at establishing new urban continuities, by extending the model of the exposition from the West part of the city to the East (between the Trancão River and the Pedrouços dock), through the adaptation of some harbor infrastructure under the state administration. The dynamics generated by PGIFR framed the development of projects of both great scale and major strategic importance, e.g., the Champalimaud Foundation in Pedrouços district, designed by Charles Correa (1930-2015); the National Coach Museum in Belém area, designed by Paulo Mendes da Rocha (b. 1928); the EDP Headquarters at Boavista embankment, by Manuel (b. 1963) and Francisco (b.1964) Aires Mateus; the Ribeira das Naus public space, by João Ferreira Nunes (b.1960) and João Gomes da Silva (b.1962); or the future Cruise Terminal in Santa Apolónia, by Carrilho da Graça (b.1952), currently under construction. The research project 'Grand Projects - Architectural and Urbanistic Operations after the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition' seeks to deepen the relations produced by urban interventions with specific contexts in which they operate on. The distinctive feature of this project consists in the launching of a critical ...

Objectives 1) the analysis of the infrastructural process from the mapping of 3 specific typologies of colonial Public Works (PW), which will be addressed in the perspective of its archival, documental and cartographic processing, and of its historiographical description?  2) the identification and critical analysis of the state of these infrastructures (reuse, strengthening or decay), after the 1975 independences. The research is based on the hypothesis that the colonial territorial infrastructure leave resilient marks in the postcolonial built environment, and that this impact should be analyzed in such a way as to support future actions. The Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino owns an essential part of the document collection concerning the colonial PW of the 19th and 20th centuries. The archival processing, cataloguing and description will be a responsibility of the project, making them available to the scientific community. After the mapping, recurring to specialized cartography, all the documentation will be gathered, and casestudies will be selected, based on specific criteria (strategic relevance, scale, impact in the built environment). Its detailed and historical description follows, in order to create inventory records in the web platform HPIP of FCG and referencing in the GIS, together with the verification of the conservation state and with the surveying of the postindependence interventions.

The research aims to survey, catalogue and contextualize housing projects in Lisbon, Luanda and Macao, built between the 1960s and the 1980s, which stood out for large scale occupation and high number of people housed. It is intended to identify the existing housing and urban models and to map the changes after 40 years of use in order to understand how to adapt to current conditions (urban and social) and to support its future.Methodology: Initially it begins with a detailed description and historical process, creating records of inventory, referenced to the Geographic Information System, and the redrawing of projects (for comparative analyses of the urban design and of the housing cell unit). It follows a visit to the complexes to verify its conservation state, experiencing the urban situation and describing the profile evolution of current populations. Questionnaires will be released for occupation and social satisfaction reporting (district/dwelling). Qualitative interviews to deep-rooted groups (social and cultural groups of belonging) will allow evaluating the integration in the city. The visits will be recorded on video for "future memory" and a documentary (three 30 minutes short-films) will be produced. In the last year, workshops will be implemented with the communities, involving architects, students, residents and local institutions, proposing architectural interventions based on historical and social analysis and in the Portuguese tradition of participatory architecture.

The project The Site of Discourse intends to identify, analyze, debate and reflect on the editorial culture of the Portuguese periodicals of architecture, over the twentieth century. This study is based on the conviction that this editorial culture cannot be fully understood without a framework that requires an interpretative and analytical nature. The title of the project — The Site of Discourse — has a number of different meanings. First and foremost, it invokes an idea that belongs to architecture itself. The title suggests that this project is about the discourse as well as about the “place” on which such that discourse is produced — the specialized periodicals of architecture. It also invokes a complex grid of configurations about “who” produces, “what” contents involves, and “how” such “site” is constructed.

This study aimed to inventory, catalog and analyze the work of sucessive Offices that belonged to the structures of the Ministries of the Colonies and later of the Overseas (henceforth designated overseas ministries) and that were responsible for the architectural project is part of a more comprehensive study about the city and architecture produced in the former colonial territories, the aim of which is to further the knowledge of the intellectual and constructed heritage generated by the Portuguese and to make it available to the public at large by means of an on line consultation system.