REHABILITATING PLACE AND HISTORY: THE CHIADO.



The cities not just belong to their inhabitants but that - and every time more- they form part of the collective subconscious of those that we are not it. Because of that, when on 25 August of 1988 we saw the images of The Chiado surrounded in flames a chill appealed us the body. To the following day they were promising to reconstruct everything in a year. They would not make it. At least, however, with a year time exceeds them to make a proposal of rehabilitation and of the hand of one of the big European architects: Alvaro Siza Vieira.

How he says A. Rossi in The Architettura of the città in the chapter of the city as a history: "However there are cities that carry out their vocation and other than ever do not lead their projects to boss".

In order to make the description of the proposal understandable we will go there for sections:
Lisbon places in the right shore of the Tajo - or Tejo how the lisbonenc and some ancient maps say Castilians. In the south and between two hillocks - that of Sant Jordi (right) and Sant Francesc (left) about the map of the city- there was a kind of sea inlets that were levelled off along the centuries, shaping the current valley of down A, fruit of the maritime commercial expansion that made going down the population of the high neighborhoods in the bank.

As a result of the earthquake and fire of 1755, and of the hand of the illuministic marquis of Pombal it started the integral rebuilding of the lower town to the detriment of the reconstruction of the pre-existent agglomerate.

The pombaline lower town possesses a morphological structure similar to the Cabanyal-Canyamelar-Punta of France or in the Barceloneta de Verboom but with a disposition perpendicular to the contour curves, in contrast to our examples.

The Chiado stands in the aspect getting on downward of the hillock of Sant Francesc and is composed of a group of streets among them the very beautiful of São Francesc (curved and steep, but quite degraded).

But that the Lisboan say do Chiado they are there: " as ruas Garrett, do Carmo i Nova do Almada". Precisely those that suffered the current fire and constituted the point of concentration of the bourgeoisie and Lisboan intelligentsia. Morphologically, The Chiado is a fragment of the lower town, which resigns itself like apart from city.

They are the permanence of the Chiado: of outline and map, then, in the pombeline reconstruction carried to head there was a total of six proposals, however, the fifth hears that of execution. The one elaborated by E. Dos Santos and continued by St. Mardel. This, in the present, is it sustains quite trustworthily.

With respect to the monuments it is necessary to highlight: the church and convent gift Carmo, votive monument of the battle of Aljubarrota, as consequence of the Castilian invasion and back Portuguese independence. In the present is quite spoiled, product, product of the earthquake of 1755. The use, today, is from museum and there is a project of rehabilitation in course.

In how much the typological dimension there has been an increasing transformation, fruit of the displacement of the residential activity towards the tertiaring that suffers this zone. Disposition in grill of lengthened blocks. Typology of multifamily, to the style of the houses of rent.


The territory of intervention allotments are structured in three coincident blocks, more or less, with the islands of victims’ homes, with a structure of the estate of denou. With the precepts of placing two covered parking and an underground station entrance fruit, this last, of a new line. All the ground was of private property; there have some bank among the owners. Which it took in an urbanistic formality similar look to the discontinuous replotting.
The advance of the proposal presented the definite project in May of 1989 and in October of the same year. In him, the architectural section has been the indispensable element, so many as an element of analysis -due to the innumerable floors that there are been necessary of making in order to know which it happened to each level - and as an element generative of all the proposal in its fundamental elements: road and future constructions. It is worth to say that in Siza it will carry out, a posterior, the execution of all the work in made concrete. It is necessary to remember in Portugal and in other countries, very often, the ornament of façade resigning itself by screens of concrete. Of so much good point that we have a "drawn and executed ordinance" and therefore empty, altitude of cornice and controlled levels. And as a consequence the traditional stair of The Chiado sustained, but not the pre-existent constructions and that, everything, they constitute a paradigm for the rehabilitation of historical centers. And the maintenance, in every coast, of some useless constructions is not it functionally. And from here to establish the relationship between stair and morphology urban, where the pre-existent tissue is a hypothesis of entry but the stair has to be the constant.

Siza relegates the two-dimensional simplistic approach of the plan to insert in an urban conception/perception as a system of itineraries, as a space of total representation and of accumulation of uses in a historical center.

Apart from the itineraries shaped by the traditional streets and the elevator, Siza, he inserts new: on one that Ivens goes from cavalcade for the outside staircases in a passage across a building that Crucifixo that includes the mouth of the underground, and the other requirement there joins the ruas Nova do Almada to gift, across the inside of the island of the block B where the housing depth shortens in fourteen meters, that cavalcade relates Garrett for us with the church of the convent.

Josep Blesa i Morante, Architect.

The 21st July of 1991 published. Supplement of TERRITORIO Y VIVIENDA of the newspaper Levante-EMV