Nuno Portas. A life dedicated to architecture, urban planning, and public service

Nuno Portas demonstrated constant concern for citizens' rights to decent housing and the city. He served as Secretary of State for Housing and Urban Planning in 1974, after the 25th of April Revolution. He created the Local Outpatient Support Service to respond to chronic and urgent needs created by years of dictatorship. Throughout his work and life, he maintained a staunch defense of the "right to the city."

Nuno Rodrigo Martins Portas, one of the leading figures in Portuguese culture, was born on September 23, 1934, in São Bartolomeu, Vila Viçosa municipality, Évora district, and at a very young age divided his life between his passions for cinema and architecture.

With a multifaceted career, Portas balanced academic activity, theoretical production, civic involvement and professional practice, after completing his architecture degree in 1959, at the Schools of Fine Arts in Lisbon and Porto.

His professional career would begin two years earlier, in 1957, on Rua da Alegria, in Lisbon, in the studio of Nuno Teotónio Pereira (1922-2016), considered one of the most notable Portuguese architects of his generation, and one of the examples of admiration that Nuno Portas cited several times in interviews.

The architect and researcher worked "in great harmony" with Teotónio Pereira for almost 20 years, particularly on projects in the Olivais neighborhood in the capital: "He was a person with enormous culture and a commitment to being truthful," Portas described in an interview with RTP in 2005.

The collaboration continued until 1974, marking a period of intense learning and involvement in projects to renovate national architecture, with ideas considered pioneering, forceful and bold at the time, materialized in contributions to the cities of Porto, Guimarães and Aveiro.

At the same time, Nuno Portas became an active figure in the cultural world, joining the magazine Arquitectura, of which he was director, and where he published distinguished texts, notably the Gulbenkian Prize for Art Criticism in 1963.

He was one of the first to write about the work of architect Álvaro Siza, both in Portugal and in specialist magazines in Spain and Italy.

Between 1962 and 1974 he carried out research at the National Civil Engineering Laboratory, where he coordinated the Architecture, Housing and Urban Planning Unit, an activity that is considered in the field as a decisive contribution to critical thinking about urban space and housing in Portugal.

With an interdisciplinary approach, Nuno Portas combined scientific rigor with social concern, anticipating debates on the city and citizenship, his peers emphasize.

From an early age, he demonstrated a constant concern for citizens' rights to decent housing and the city, which was reflected in his defense of cooperative housing models and the creation of the Local Outpatient Support Service (SAAL), when he was Secretary of State for Housing and Urban Planning, in 1974.

"All my political activity has always been linked to my role as an architect," he emphasized in the same interview with RTP, in which he stressed the importance of these professionals being attentive to inequalities and the real needs of communities, advocating that they deepen their knowledge in the fields of anthropology and sociology.

Nuno Portas, father of Paulo and Miguel Portas, died at the age of 90. The news was shared by Helena Sacadura Cabral on her Instagram page this Sunday, July 27th.

News to the Minute | 11:46 - 07/27/2025

His writings—both on architecture and film criticism—reveal a personality attentive to culture, contemporary thought, and social transformation, refusing to conform to the norm and maintaining an interventionist stance throughout his career.

His teaching career began at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, where he taught Design between 1965 and 1971. In 1983, as a member of the teaching staff at the Porto School of Fine Arts, he participated in the founding of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto, where he became a full professor in 1989.

Later, with the status of retired professor, he maintained his intellectual influence in academia through his legacy, which included the structuring of the first master's degree in Urban Environmental Planning and Design.

Nuno Portas' academic activity extended internationally, with stints at prestigious institutions such as the Technical School of Architecture in Barcelona, the Paris Institute of Urbanism, the Polytechnic of Milan, the University of Ferrara in Italy, and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

Still on the international level, he led the Intermunicipal Planning of Madrid (1980-1983), where he lived for those three years, and was a consultant for the municipal strategic plans of Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela, also in Spain.

He worked with the United Nations, the European Union, and Spanish architect Oriol Bohigas (1925–2021) on projects for Rio de Janeiro, such as the Waterfront Plan and the Recovery Plan for the city's Central Zone. In Cape Verde, he contributed to the legislative framework for urban planning.

"Today, architecture is obsessed with invention and disregards memory. But there is no language without memory," he commented, also in an interview, arguing that "heritage should be respected but added to, which is what the ancients always did," maintaining that the discipline consists of "an art of great permanence and responsibility."

In the political sphere, he was appointed Secretary of State for Housing and Urban Planning after the 25th of April Revolution, during the first three Provisional Governments (1974-1975). In this role, he led a profound reform of the sector, promoting housing cooperatives, the SAAL, and laid the foundations for the current Municipal Master Plans. In 1990, he served as councilor for urban planning at the Vila Nova de Gaia City Council.

As an architect, he worked in Portugal, in addition to Nuno Teotónio Pereira, with prominent figures in the sector, such as Pedro Botelho, José Luís Gomes, Camilo Cortesão and Bartolomeu Cabral.

With a work focused on urban thinking, he coordinated strategic and planning plans in various regions of the country.

In an interview with the Brazilian architecture magazine Vitruvius in 2013, he stated: "I consider myself a 'street planner' - a term used for centuries - because of the importance I have been giving to the most lasting elements of urban planning: the networks of public space that must come before the buildings that last less, as we all know."

The magazine highlighted Nuno Portas' "deeply humanist" vision, always concerned "with reconciling architectural quality with social needs, arguing that the right to decent housing was inseparable from the right to the city."

Among the most relevant projects, the plan for the University of Aveiro campus, the first General Plan for Expo 98 and the redevelopment studies for Chelas and the historic center of Guimarães stand out.

Author of extensive published works on theory, critical history of architecture, and contemporary urbanism, he maintained a constant connection to the world of criticism and cinephilia, writing texts in various specialized publications, with a style recognized for its analytical acuity and social commitment.

Nuno Portas created a series of programs that he himself hosted, entitled 'À Volta da Cidade', focused on urban planning and architectural heritage in Portugal, which RTP broadcast in 1978-1979, in which each episode addressed different themes related to the evolution of cities and national architecture.

In this program, he spoke about "Housing Problems", "City Growth", "Heritage Protection", addressed problems in city centers and their transformation and growth, looked at issues of architecture and urban planning, local administration, showed works such as the Bairro da Bouça, by Álvaro Siza, always visiting the sites, showing concrete examples and maintaining a tone of dialogue with the surrounding space - and with the audience -, then rare in television production.

The documentary 'A Cidade de Portas', dedicated to the complexity of the architect's concept of the city, directed by Humberto Kzure and Teresa Prata, premiered at the IndieLisboa Festival in 2021.

Nuno Portas had a strong connection to the film club movement in Portugal, as an active member of the Lisbon Film Club, and left a critical view of cinema expressed in several articles and essays, in which he analyzed the role of this expression as an art form and as a reflection of society.

Early in his career, in the 1950s, when he was drafted into the military, he even made a short film about his military service. In an interview with the newspaper i in 2013, he spoke about this 30-minute film, edited by filmmaker Fernando Lopes (1935-2012): "I took the guys coming from the field and showed them how people were treated."

Nuno Portas fundamentally believed that cinema, like architecture, had "the power to influence and transform the human experience in space and environment."

Nuno Portas is the father of politicians Paulo and Miguel Portas (1958-2012) - from his first marriage to Helena Sacadura Cabral - and of journalist and businesswoman Catarina Portas, from his second marriage to Margarida Sousa Lobo.

Among the distinctions received are the Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Aveiro and the Polytechnic Institute of Milan, the Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry the Navigator and the Sir Patrick Abercrombie Prize from the International Union of Architects.

In 2012, Guimarães – European Capital of Culture – dedicated the retrospective exhibition 'The Urban Being – On the Paths of Nuno Portas' to him, later shown at the Belém Cultural Center in Lisbon. The exhibition, which resulted in a catalog published by the National Press, demonstrated how his entire work was an affirmation of the "right to the city."

"The fight to win the architect's right to design must be firm, but cautious and progressive," he wrote in O Jornal do Arquitecto in 2017, when he was honored by the Order of Architects.

"The success of this struggle," he continued, "depends, first and foremost, on ourselves as a group. It depends on knowing how to create evidence, before a wider, albeit unprepared, public, that our majority of professionals - and not just the small group of notables - can offer services that others will only offer by exception, and at a cost that corresponds to the benefits that this more qualified service will bring to users."

And he concluded: "A lot will have to change if we want to legitimize our claim that the architect, as a cultural agent, is essential to the social development of communities."

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