Nuno Portas (1934–2025). The architect who imagined cities as moral hypotheses

A pivotal figure in Portuguese architecture in the second half of the 20th century, Nuno Portas combined critical action, theoretical thought, and architectural practice with singular energy and passion. Having passed away at the age of 90, he leaves behind a multifaceted body of work that spans the fields of urban planning, housing policy, research, and teaching, in a playful and provocative way, considering the city not only as a space but as a form of consciousness.

We will no longer traverse redemptive, enlightened, and humble cities together. We lacked the audacity to build that other face that, by serving as our foundation, would allow us to establish our dream from the ground up, to reclaim a new homeland, in a commitment of fervor and restlessness. But in Portugal, there were some who embarked on this adventure, which would have to begin with profound inquiry. Now that Nuno Portas has left us, it is clear that there are not many more figures who, like him, sought to transcend the boundaries between architecture, politics, criticism, and citizenship. At a time when we realize the true scale of the crisis due to the lack of responsible urban planning and a clear definition of what should endure as public and common space, now that houses are scarce, and it is clear that the issue of housing required responses from the State, it becomes clear how few recognized the lack of a political vision for cities. And the recognition of this disaster reveals who sought to prevent it, and it is certain that few have provoked so much, with so little noise, as Nuno Portas did.

Architecture and society

His death, at the age of ninety, brings to a close one of the most vast and nonconformist paths of 20th-century Portuguese architectural culture, whose action traversed, with unusual persistence, the spheres of criticism, design practice, urban theory, teaching and public policy, without falling prey to any of them. With an overwhelming memory and erudition, he burst forth with a fundamental intervention in the thinking of space and the city from the late 1950s onwards, and the work he bequeaths to us, after all this time, assumes a discontinuous and irregular appearance, is no less decisive for that, but obliges us to read a broad temporal period, not allowing itself to be inventoried in buildings, in the same way that it cannot simply be compiled by considering a set of academic titles or government positions, because it is inscribed above all in the historical tensions that he knew how to assimilate—and in many cases provoke—between architecture and society, between territory and form, between institutions and collective desire.

Formed at a time when Portuguese architecture oscillated between an innocuous functionalism and the last throes of an academic studio culture, Portas distinguished himself from the outset by an uncompromising critical gesture, attentive to international transformations and deeply sensitive to the specificities of local contexts, marginal construction practices, and popular ways of life, rejecting both the orthodoxies of modernity and the stylistic temptations of nascent postmodernism.

Having begun by writing critical essays on cinema, he quickly shifted his focus to the built environment. He realized—perhaps before anyone else—that Portuguese architecture, in the mid-20th century, required a fierce, critical voice, capable of articulating place and form, technique and life, the real and the possible. His editorship of Arquitectura magazine in the 1960s was one of those rare moments when criticism became a founding act. In the shadow of the Italian architect, urban planner, and historian Bruno Zevi, whose texts he translated and with whom he would later collaborate, he produced a writing that was not merely commentary but already an operation, rehearsing a critique that sought the efficacy of a project in the text, and that opened space, in Portugal, for a new intelligibility of architectural practice, one no longer grounded in form, but in the architect's position within the social fabric, the mechanisms of production, and housing regimes.

As Jorge Figueira notes in Público , in the 1960s, he published a series of articles that sought to account for the multiple directions then emerging for architecture—from neorealism to architectural fiction. He participated in meetings and cultivated international connections that challenged Portugal's sub-modern status. He also published two seminal books— Architecture for Today (1964) and The City as Architecture (1969)—in which the experience of time is revealed with an almost cathartic intensity.

The 'reformist democrat'

Against geometric asepsis, "rationalism" proposed context; against the model, it proposed a greater proximity to places and people; against the building, it proposed the neighborhood. And this critical vision was constantly grounded in practice, no less significant than his work as an architect—almost always in partnership, as befitted those who viewed architecture as a collective practice rather than authorship—with Nuno Teotónio Pereira, on projects that, while not numerous, marked Portuguese architectural culture through the ethical demands they inscribed: the Vila Viçosa House (1958–62), the House in Sesimbra (1960), and the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (1962–75), a highly controversial project that is now a national monument. These buildings stood for decades as discreet monuments to the ethical rigor of form, where formal restraint did not conceal a typological radicality and a profound reflection on the role of architecture in times of political seclusion. More than an author, Portas asserted himself as an agent of change, someone who introduced noise, criticism, and hesitation into the discipline's overly pacified circuits. His intelligence was one of synthesis, and he did not smooth over edges, but rather exposed tensions. Another remarkable work was the Bairro de Olivais Sul, which he designed with Bartolomeu Costa Cabral, and which, "with its squares, wide spaces, and pronounced roofs," operates as "a kind of challenge to the modern city proposed by Olivais Norte," as Nuno Grande noted.

The April Revolution caught him with the right tools. In the provisional government, he was Secretary of State for Housing and Urban Planning, and there he founded what would be his most radical and lasting gesture: SAAL, the Local Outpatient Support Service. This name—which today sounds technical, almost administrative—hid a militant utopia. SAAL was not a program, but an ordered insurrection. It brought architects to the streets, residents to design tables, and clandestine neighborhoods to the legality of housing dignity. It organized assemblies, fostered cooperatives, and encouraged self-construction—not as a sacrifice of quality, but as a demand for popular sovereignty. SAAL did not establish a style: it established a method. And in this method, Portas brought politics and architecture together as few have dared. By enshrining it in the Constitution, in Article 65 on the right to housing, he left a legal echo that resonates to this day, even if forgotten or betrayed.

But Portas was no naive revolutionary. He understood the limits of transformation, he understood the interplay of forces. And that's why he always rejected the caricature of the architect-redeemer. He preferred the more ambiguous and provocative role of the obstinate reformer. As Nuno Grande points out in his testimony to Público , "Portas was more than a revolutionary, he was a reformist; he was a reformist democrat." "And that's why he believed he could work within the institutions during the Estado Novo to change things from within; that's why he was called upon when they renewed themselves after the 25th of April. Even the most radical left believed in his vision for the city, which, quite frankly, when compared to what we have today, should make us blush with shame—it was much more intelligent, open, comprehensive, and debatable."

In the following years, marginalized by the dominant logic of technocratic urbanism and the rise of a decorative or cynical postmodern architecture, Portas shifted his attention to the city as a field of study, intervention, and teaching. He served as a city councilor in Gaia. He was a professor. He was a commissioner and a consultant. He was never a man of a single front, but rather of several intersecting causes. At the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, where he entered in the 1980s, he clashed with the school's heroic rhetoric. He was up against histrionic postmodernism, iconic architecture, the delirium of loose form. And then, in the 1990s, he faced a purified neomodernism, which re-imposed the phantoms he believed had been overcome. But Portas did not retreat: he redesigned the ground. He turned to urbanism, to the science of flows, to the invisible investigation of territories. It was there that he saw the future: not in large buildings, but in systems of use, in spatial micro-negotiations, in the productive conflict between functions, desires and forms.

His rejection of the monumental gesture, his insistence on processes, participation, and systems analysis, contrast with the then-dominant formal revivalism. His thinking becomes less visible but more profound: he investigates the territory as a palimpsest, as a conflict between uses and functions, as a place of composition without synthesis. For Portas, the project is no longer a form, but a device.

From the Aveiro Campus to Expo'98

Although rarely called upon for major projects, Portas discreetly participates in significant moments of Portuguese urban transformation—at the Aveiro Campus, during the initial phase of Expo '98, and, as a city councilor, in Gaia, where he experiences firsthand the limits between technical decision-making and political pressure. He never adapts to the media spotlight or the festive circulation of ideas, and perhaps for this reason he remains a subterranean yet inescapable figure, one of those intellectuals whose legacy permeates without showing off.

In recent years, belatedly recognized by institutions that previously ignored him, Portas has been the subject of exhibitions, tributes, and theses—the most significant of which, *The Urban Being – On the Paths of Nuno Portas* , held in Guimarães in 2012 and curated by Nuno Grande, rigorously traced the multiple facets of his thought. With Álvaro Domingues, he shared a critical and lateral view of the territory; with Siza, he maintained an intermittent but fruitful dialogue; with younger generations, he cultivated a generous but never condescending attention. He received the Sir Patrick Abercrombie Prize from the UIA, received an honorary doctorate from ISCTE-IUL, and was honored by the Order of Architects—deserving distinctions, though always below the scale of his contribution.

Now, with his disappearance, what remains is a country less inhabited when it comes to thought and critical judgment. Portuguese architecture, which so often allowed itself to be seduced by aesthetics or imports, loses one of its deepest and most committed voices. This isn't about praising the man—though he deserves it—but about recognizing that with him disappears an attitude, an ethic, an urgency.

Portas dies without an intellectual will, without a foundation bearing his name, without a collected work, without a monument. But he remains among us in what matters most: a way of being in architecture and the city that rejects decorative noise, that opposes the spectacularization of space and the complacency of discourse, and that insists, with stubbornness and rigor, that to design is to think, to intervene, to open possibilities. What he leaves behind is not a model, but an ethic. And above all, a question that permeates everything: what city is possible when architecture serves not power, but life?