Centro Cultural de Belém

Among Belém’s great historic symbols, the Belém Cultural Centre marks the moment when Lisbon decided to inscribe its modernity too into the city’s monumental landscape. Its construction was decided in 1988, in the context of Portugal’s European presidency in 1992, and the project by Vittorio Gregotti and Manuel Salgado imagined a kind of open city, made of buildings, streets, squares and bridges, in dialogue with Praça do Império, the Jerónimos Monastery and the Tagus. During a visit, it is worth exploring the outdoor spaces as much as the auditoriums and exhibition rooms, because the CCB is not understood only from within: it also lives in the light, the voids and the relationship between pale stone and the river. Today, listed as a Monument of Public Interest, it remains one of the places where Lisbon shows, with remarkable ease, that contemporary architecture can also create memory.