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A carefully balanced exterior
A rather jazzy central Lisbon apartment block from the diagonals on the main entrance to the angular features of the façade. These include the angled bay windows up the centre of the building and the small, angled balconies accompanying them, along with the white horizontal bars running across the exterior.
Chevrons merging into diamond forms
An angled façade viewed from an angle
This row of nicely repainted one storey buildings was originally designed as a unity for what was probably residential purposes. Located on a busy, main road in Guia, a small town not far inland from the coast of Portugal’s Algarve, they form a part of the region’s Art Deco heritage today. There is a felicitous balance of vertical and horizontal elements.
While the Condes Cinema opened in 1951 buildings at this location of Praça dos Restauradores at Rua Condes already had a long history as theatres. First opening as the Teatro da Rua dos Condes in 1738, the theatre began its life as an opera house. It was constructed on land on land owned by the Conde da Ericeira (Count of Ericeira) by what is now known as the Rua Condes. This was a part of the city popular with the nobility, and several aristocrats had their palaces there. The theatre had to be rebuilt in 1755 after being badly damaged by the terrible Lisbon earthquake earlier that year.
A new theatre, the Teatro Novo da Rua dos Condes, was constructed in 1888 on the same location, and ten years later it remodelled inside to increase seating capacity. Then the twentieth century and its technological marvels arrived and by 1915 theatre had been converted into a cinema. This survived for decades until 1951 when it was torn apart to make way for a purpose-built cinema, the building we see today. The architect Raul Tojal began with the shell of the previous theatre and the new cinema was able to project 70mm films. The new Condes Cinema almost survived until the twenty-first century, closing in 1997. It was converted into the Hard Rock Café, Lisbon, in 2003.
We could certainly label this Lisbon apartment building as being Streamline Moderne with its racy, curving balconies. The street it is located on is named after a fascinating character known as Abade Faria, or Abbot Faria, born in 1756 in the Portuguese Indian colony of Goa as José Custódio de Faria. Aside from being a man of the cloth he was a revolutionary, and also one of the first to study hypnotism.
The Eden Teatro, or Eden Theatre, sits on the Praça dos Restauradores in central Lisbon, and is one of Lisbon’s most spectacular cinema buildings, showing films up until 1989. Cassiano Branco and Carlo Florencio Dias were the architects responsible for this Art Deco palace, which opened in 1931. The building features a magnificent, creamy pink coloured marble façade and a floating stone frieze across the top. There is also an abundance of geometric fenestration throughout. The interior was altered when it was converted into an apart-hotel complex in 2001.
This is a small, two storey building in the Portuguese seaside town of Alvor. Alas, only the upper floor maintains the original Art Deco form, in particular the parapet which comes replete with steps, massings and horizontal bars tricked out in blue. Pedro Álvares Cabral was a Portuguese nobleman, military commander, navigator and explorer regarded as the European discoverer of Brazil.
There are some apartment blocks on the Avenida António Augusto de Aguiar which have excellent Art Deco reliefs over their entrances. These are in the Saldanha district of Lisbon and belong to a group which probably all had the same team of architects.
The first is a building located at Avenida António Augusto de Aguiar 15, which features a corner tower that has a large, carved, stone relief of a family group above the entrance at its base. The mother and father are portrayed giving support on either side of the child.
Nearby at Avenida António Augusto de Aguiar #9 and #7 are two other related buildings with excellent street level carved, stone reliefs. The one at number #9 features a courting couple of birds, and at #7 a reclining woman lies wreathed with draperies. A date and the sculptor’s name is just visible on the latter at bottom left: 1942, Leopoldo.
This five-storey apartment block constructed in 1937 has a façade which has a perfect balance of horizontal and vertical elements. Located in central Lisbon, the architect was Cassiano Branco who also designed the Victoria Hotel there. He used shallow, rectangular setbacks emerging from a central axis formed of three continuous bevelled bars rising as a fin from just above the entrance up to the roofline. In contrast to the purely rectilinear façade the entry doors are composed of playful triangles and circles.
A modest, Art Deco bungalow in the seaside city of Albufeira, in the Algarve region of southern Portugal. There is a date at the top centre of the building of 8 October, 1953, and below this a series of diagonals making what could be either a zigzag or a pair of mountain peaks. Underneath all of this is a five-pointed star.
The Victoria Hotel was designed by the tremendously talented architect Cassiano Viriato Branco, who also designed other landmark, mid-war buildings in Lisbon such as the Teatro Éden. Work began in 1934 on the project and it was completed in 1936, though this was only part of the architect’s concept.
The building had a number of features, including a facing of pink marble, but the most eye-catching one was certainly the circular balconies stacked along the corner of the six-storey building. These were cleverly echoed with a round porch projecting out above the entrance.
By the mid 1970s the hotel had become run down and neglected which engendered an attempt to revive it. Nothing came of this in the end and the building was bought in 1985 by the Lisbon branch of the Portuguese Communist Party, and it remains their regional headquarters.
Global Art Deco 