In Lisbon, the Baixa (downtown) reconstruction after the earthquake of 1755 allowed the development of a relatively innovative process of urban fabric design and implementation. This was only possible through a strong political wish with the technical knowledge of the Casa do Risco (Drawing House), composed by the King Minister Sebastião José de Carvalho known as Marquês de Pombal; Manuel da Maia, the kingdom master engineer that drew the entire program as well as the legal and physical implementation process; and finally the engineers and architects Eugénio dos Santos and Carlos Mardel that outlined the plan and drew the image of the new Baixa.
Besides the legal support for its implementation, which established a proportional compensation system based on the area and location of the previous properties that were reparcelled, the plan was based on three essential elements: an urban layout; a composition of facades; and a constructive system, the Gaiola Pombalina.
The facade design uses modular elements in the composition of three basic types corresponding to hierarchical levels of facades that were implemented according to the street location.
Praça do Comércio follows the heritage of the European Place Royale – a regular polygonal design, with one of its sides completely opening out onto the scenery and the immense river estuary. Its other sides consist of homogeneous architecture, custom built for this space, a Pombaline arcade, levelled at the same height and ending in two single turrets whose lines are not continued in the buildings.
The northern end is dominated by a nineteenth century arch, which stands as a gate to the city and, in the centre of the square stands the statue of King José – by Machado de Castro.
This square originates from the Terreiro do Paço da Ribeira (River Palace Square) when, in the 16th century, for practical and financial reasons, King Manuel I left his palace in the castle and had a new palace built next to the river.
This changed the urban layout of an area that was structured according to the logistical needs of sixteenth century travel, the new palace being built perpendicular to the river and ending in a rampart – a defensive structure designed by Diogo de Arruda. Filipe de Terzi would go on to rebuild the famous rampart at the end of this century, which was then the source of the two eighteenth century mounds that flank the square to the south.
The aristocratic Pombaline buildings open out on the ground floor into arcades around the square. Designed for trade in the eighteenth century, they were in fact taken over by ministries and governmental departments. The complex power machine has been leaving the area little by little over recent decades, enabling a change of usage with the installation of commercial amenities, which, making use of the eighteenth century architectural materials and structures, have shown the space’s worth from the inside.
Rua Augusta is a straight and regular street located between the Praça do Comércio (old Terreiro do Paço) and the Praça D. Pedro IV (old Rossio). In the cross-section, with approximately 14 meters wide, it is possible to distinguish the paved sidewalks from the more recent central platform, a memory of the separate circulations that it supported until the 1980s.
The monumental arch of the Rua Augusta assumes the role of transitional element between the street and the Praça do Comércio, at the southern end of the street, and is the exceptional element within the regularity of the facades composition that defines the street.
Designed and built from the Reconstruction Plan prepared by the Engineering Captain Eugénio dos Santos, also architect of the city Senate, and by the Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Mardel, architect of the Casa do Risco, the Rua Augusta was fully designed with a width of 60 feet and a regular and continuous facade composition.
The proposed streets for the reconstruction achieved a significant level of modernity for the time: the cross-section was divided into three parts, one-sixth of each side for the pedestrians and the central part, larger, for horses and carriages; a sewage infrastructure that received the water from the dumps of the blocks, ran under of the street. Although this is similar to what happens today, it was an innovation for the city of Lisbon in the eighteenth century.
Despite some variation in the building height, a result of later additions to the initial projected model, its clear the regularity of the longitudinal cross-section of the street given by the modular composition of the Pombaline buildings. In the case of the Rua Augusta, the facades composition takes a more elaborate expression than in the other streets due to it having been conceived as the main axis within the urban structure.
The Rua Augusta is the main axis of articulation of the two main exceptional spaces, assuming partially the role that previous streets Rua Nova do Cano / Nova d’ El Rei / dos Ourives do Ouro were before the earthquake.
Traditionally, the street served to support comercial functions in the ground floors, today largely linked to the restoration and tourism, which contribute to the occupation of the street space by esplanades. Daily, and associated with the frequency of tourists/visitors, there are activities that contribute to the street experience as the ephemeral occupation by street artists.
The block selected as representative of the Baixa urban fabric is bordered to the North by Rua da Assunção, the East by the Rua dos Correeiros, the South by the Rua da Vitória and the West by the Rua Augusta, with approximately 25m x 70m. This rectangular area, like all blocks from Lisbon downtown, was initially divided according to a predefined system of equitable redistribution of the property, but always following a grid with an orthogonal composition framing both the facades design as the buildings structure and its internal organization.
The block shows today both the grid rule of composition as the different widths of the plots that always have the same depth, of half of the block width. All buildings share the same built typology, the Pombaline building, whose internal organization of dwellings includes a front line of rooms, the interior divisions, and the back line divisions which includes the kitchen with waste removal through the narrow lightwell inside the block. However, the typological variations resulting from the different widths of the plots are as much recognizable as the later floors additions and the removal of some walls.
The different composition of each front block is related with the hierarchical level of the streets that define it, which, associated to the narrow lightwell that allows the dwellings ventilation and the outflow of water, suggests an ideia of block as a great divided building.
Although initially the ground floor is dedicated to trade and the upper floors to housing, at present, if the occupation of the ground floor corresponds to restaurants and shops, the remaining floors can accommodate housing and services, and even be used as storage spaces of the stores.
