A New Praça do Comércio
As you can see in the photo above and can read in a previous post, Lisbon’s biggest square is being renovated. It will have a new pavement, will remove traffic from two of its sides, and plans to attract new businesses to the buildings under its arches. Originally the deadline for completion of the works was October of 2010 but City Hall has anticipated that for April or May, in time for one of the city’s biggest events of the year:

The Pope Visit
The Pope will be in Portugal from May 11th to 14th. He’ll of course be in Fatima, but will also celebrate mass in Porto and Lisbon. In Lisbon it will take place in Comércio Square.

Rock in Rio-Lisboa Returns
The self-titled biggest music event in the world that first started in Rio but that has moved to Lisbon will return to the Portuguese capital in 2010. It takes place every two years in Lisbon, and this year you can expect another series of concerts by many other the world’s chart-topping artists, bands, and world-famous DJs. So far only Muse has been confirmed, but expect the lineup to be revealed throughout the first months of the year. Rock in Rio-Lisboa in 2010 happens on May 21st, 22nd, 27, 28, and 29.

100 Years of the Portuguese Republic
When the last Portuguese king was assassinated in 1908, it was the beginning of the end of the Portuguese monarchy, giving rise to a new Portuguese republic in 1910. One hundred years later Lisbon will be celebrating the event throughout the city in October, with special events taking place downtown by Municipal Square, Comercio Square, and Belém.

The New Popular Art Museum
It closed a few years ago for its building to be transformed into a museum devoted to the Portuguese language and culture similar to the one in São Paulo (Brazil), but after a petition to bring the old museum back, the minister of culture has recently announced that the Museu de Arte Popular will be back in 2010. This is a museum dedicated to the traditional arts and crafts of Portugal, originally displayed by region. Its old home in a building between the Discoveries Monument and Belem Tower will be renovated to once again welcome the collection.

Parque Mayer Gains New Life
Parque Mayer is a sort of small Lisbon-style Broadway from the 20th century. It’s a group of old theaters around the corner from Avenida da Liberdade that have had a slow death over the years but that have also had rehabilitation plans for quite some time. Some of those plans were quite ambitious, including one by architect Frank Gehry for which he was paid 2.2 million euros. But the project has been rethought and it will now be less monumental, although perhaps a little more tasteful. It will include a connection to the Botanical Garden nearby and with works throughout 2010, it is hoped to be complete by 2011 and bring new life and theater magic to the center of the city.

Casa dos Bicos Reopens as the José Saramago Foundation
One of Lisbon’s most curious buildings due to its spiked façade will now have a new function. Casa dos Bicos in Alfama has recently been cleaned up and will soon reopen to serve as the José Saramago Foundation, which will reportedly include a library of the Nobel Prize-winning author.

It has just been announced that Lisbon’s Chiado Museum (officially the National Museum of Contemporary Art) will be expanding to a building currently occupied by a local police force. In the past, that same building was a convent and has been seen as the future annex of the Chiado Museum over the last decade. At the moment, the Contemporary Art Museum is housed in part of the former convent building, after a beautiful renovation by French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte in 1994. It has around 4500 pieces of Portuguese art from the past century, but they’re not all displayed at the same time due to lack of space. Instead, the museum presents temporary thematic exhibitions of the permanent collection, but hopefully with this planned expansion it will be able to show all of its works together with special temporary exhibitions and educational services.
But as it is, this museum is already very much worth of a visit by admirers of contemporary art, and in particular by those curious about Portuguese artists. Now even more so, with its current exhibition “Modern Portuguese Art: From Amadeo to Paula Rego.” It’s being shown until the 31st of October, and if you go on a Sunday morning before 2PM, it’s free. It presents works from the first half of the 20th century in the cultural and political context of the time, as well as important works by Portuguese artists heavily influenced by the art of Paris, as was the case of Amadeo Souza Cardoso and Vieira da Silva. From more recent times there are pieces by Joaquim Rodrigo and Paula Rego, this last artist now with her own museum in Cascais, as recently reported here on GoLisbon.

Continuing our series of Lisbon in the Future reports, today we bring you a project for outside the city, in Cascais, or more specifically for the Cascais marina. It’s a 100m-high tower with 30 floors that will be a hotel offering 200 rooms called Hotel da Luz and designed by Pedro Appleton of Lisbon-based Promontório Arquitectos. It was first announced in 2006 and it was hoped that it would be unveiled in 2009, but it’s clearly behind schedule and no new updates have been given. Still, the project remained “on the table” as of a few months ago.
It’s an architecturally ambitious project, as this will be a glass tower that is more common in emerging metropolises like Dubai than in a European resort town, but it’s surely to become an icon not just of Cascais but of the entire Lisbon region.

Lisbon’s Parque das Nações district will soon have another daring piece of architecture. That’s the IMOCOM building, an environmentally-friendly project for a real estate company that will have its headquarters in one of the seven floors. The rest of the space will hold other offices, while the ground floor will be for street-level shops. In total this construction will cost 40 million euros and will include a multimedia façade on which those passing by will see audiovisual information.
The design is by Nuno Mateus and José Mateus, two Portuguese architects of ARX Portugal Arquitectos, and will be standing next to the Vasco da Gama mall behind the twin São Gabriel and São Rafael towers as pictured above.

See more projects for Lisbon in the future.

In 2017, Lisbon will have a new airport across the river in the town of Alcochete (pronounced “Alcoo-shit” so hopefully the airport will be baptized with a different name…)  At the moment there are two bridges linking both sides of the Tagus, but a third one will be necessary for travelers to reach the airport, especially those using the future high-speed train that is also being planned.

Right now the bridge still has no name (it’s simply being called “the third bridge over the Tagus”) and an official design is still being decided. However, it apparently will be something like the one seen on the virtual image above, and that will be the future view from the castle. As is the case with any new major construction, many people are protesting the idea (even sending around a petition against it), claiming that it ruins a classic view of the city. Some have even suggested that the third Tagus crossing should be underwater, while others prefer another location for the bridge. What is known for sure is that it will in fact be a bridge estimated to cost 1.7 billion euros and that it will have 3 or 4 lanes for automobiles with the rest of the space given to high-speed and regular train services.

(See more Lisbon in the Future posts)

At the moment, Comercio Square, the largest, most monumental square in Lisbon is undergoing works in its entire central area due to maintenance in the city’s sewage system. Once that is over next month, the square will continue to be a construction site until late next year. It will get a long overdue makeover, removing traffic from two of its sides, allowing for more pedestrian use of the space. The other two sides will still be used for transport, with two car lanes by the river, and the side by the triumphal arch being used only by trams. As illustrated below, the sides no longer used by the automobile will be given broad sidewalks, most likely to be transformed into outdoor cafes. That pavement where tables and chairs will stand on will be crossed by lines inspired by coordinates on navigational charts used by the Portuguese explorers. The central area around the statue will be given an ocher color, supposedly so that the sun reflects less from the ground and the place becomes less blinding on sunny days. A lighter color will mark a walkway from the triumphal arch towards the river and the steps that descend to it. It is hoped that the complete renovation can be unveiled in time for the October 2010 celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Portuguese Republic, an event brought by the assassination of the king on this square in 1908 which led to the end of monarchy soon after that.

-Other Lisbon in the Future posts

A much controversial new Coaches Museum is coming to Lisbon. Due to lack of space, what is currently Lisbon’s most visited national museum needs a new home, and it has been found right in front of its present location. Pritzker Award-winning architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha was called to come up with a design for the new building, and the result is what you can see above, a massive (and some say not that attractive) structure standing 4.5 meters above the ground. Inside it will include space for maintenance and repairs of the coaches, restaurants, and an auditorium for special events, as the building will be quite large (and some argue disproportionate to its surroundings).

There are many reasons for all the controversy. In addition to spending (critics say “wasting”) millions of euros on something that’s not broken and therefore doesn’t need to be fixed (when many other cultural projects lack financing), many believe the current historical building is the ideal place for the collection, and that the bare modern white walls of the future home will take away much of the charm. This is a unique collection not just for its originality when it opened to the public but also for its number of fairytale vehicles which reportedly is the world’s largest and most valuable.

After a cost of 31.5 million euros (already available thanks to taxes paid by the Lisbon Casino), it is hoped that everything will be complete in October of next year, when everyone will finally be able to see if in fact those timeless coaches will shine brighter in a grand new modern building.

Lisbon’s Vasco da Gama Tower is being turned into a Dubai-like landmark. It was built as a viewing tower for the World Expo that took place in the city in 1998 but is now becoming a luxury hotel. When it was first being planned there was a rather nouveau riche idea of it being marketed as a 6-star service much like Dubai’s famous Burj Al Arab which it somewhat resembles, but the group behind it seems to have settled for a “traditional” 5-star rating. That group is Sana, and the hotel will be called Sana Torre Vasco da Gama Royal Hotel, opening in 2010 with 178 rooms (10 of them being suites) on 20 floors. The original observation deck will be maintained, and it will continue to offer a panoramic restaurant. Its base is being rebuilt and at the moment we can already see some of the floors going up. The final design is pictured on the right and was created by Portuguese architect Nuno Leónidas.  It looks a little less like a sailing ship as it was originally projected, and will be a “green hotel” making as much use of natural lighting and natural materials as possible.

For other projects planned for Lisbon in the future, come back to Go Lisbon Blog throughout the upcoming weeks.