Portuguese Architecture: Escola Primária

Today’s blog post is pulled out of the vault! These summer days, dreaming of travel to beautiful places has to substitute for the real thing, so I thought I’d post this quick read from 2012, when I was working on a resort hotel project on the Portuguese coastline.

Area we visited on the coastline

When I was in Portugal on business last month, I was lucky enough to have an amazing lunch in the countryside. Located approximately 140 km (86 miles) from Lisbon, we visited an old schoolhouse running successfully as a restaurant offering many traditional Portuguese meals and local wines. I remember the long stretches of road between Grandola and Santiago do Cacem lined with cork trees, an indigenous natural resource in that region. We arrived at the building below surrounded by nothing but nature.

Restaurant where we dined, Escola Primaria

Interiors of the Restaurant, source: google images

Interior view of the Restaurant, source: living in liberia blog

As I sat inside the restaurant, I noticed a series of interesting arches that spanned the length of the dining room. Later, back at work in Manhattan, I googled the meaning behind the asymmetric arches, and found images of an abandoned school house with the same arches.

These were the arches that I saw inside the restaurant. This image is of a different building with the same arches.

My researched found that in the 1940’s, Portugal launched a program of school construction en masse that intended to give all children a Portuguese school at their fingertips to increase the level of public education. Schools were built according to prototypes, which featured traditional Portuguese architecture. Through the 1960’s, more than 7000 of these primary schools were built, so you’re sure to run across at least one in just about any part of the country. These schools became a trademark of the Portuguese landscape.

Source: Google Image

Source: Google Images

The meaning behind the asymmetry of the arch is still unknown to me, but my guess would be that the arches reference the “flying buttress” which can be found in many churches in Europe constructed during the Gothic Period. They are both structural and architectural - as seen in the above images, the flying buttress-like arches are creating an exterior corridor or hallway for the primary school. The graceful flowing geometry of this exterior hallway could also show influence by the modernist movement of the mid 20th century, when architects like Eero Saarinen were using dramatic concrete arches in buildings and landmarks. Based on my observations while traveling, I would venture to guess that these buildings were likely looking more toward antiquity than modern times for inspiration.