Lisbon: The Latest Architecture and News

Models and drawings are privileged tools for understanding architecture: they display the physical form and expression of buildings. This exhibition brings together a group of models that, after having been exhibited in the past to represent works of architecture, were kept safe by the Centro Cultural de Belém. Like the constructed buildings themselves, whose forms they replicate in miniature, time has passed over them and left its marks. Twenty years since they were originally presented, they are now like treasures that show more than reflections of an era. Transformed into fragments, they offer evidence of the way society, at a certain moment, perceived architecture made in Portugal: sometimes exacerbating or diminishing differences between authors and schools, sometimes scrutinising or acknowledging new authors, sometimes forging the possibility of the existence of a Portuguese architectonic culture with its own specific qualities.

Garagem Sul at Centro Cultural de Belém—the Lisbon gallery dedicated to architecture—opens a Portuguese iteration of At Play on September 28, 2021. Presented initially at CIVA in Brussels, the exhibition is adapted to Garagem Sul and expanded with new works.