With Casa das Histórias Paula Rego captured by Sonia Sabnani, Eduardo Souto de Moura trades the abstractionism of his earlier work for archetype, placing two red concrete pyramids in a Cascais (Lisbon) garden the painter chose for him.
The pyramids are the first thing visible above the line of pollarded trees, and the colour is the second. Red board-formed concrete, pigmented with iron oxide and cast against horizontal planks so the grain reads from a distance, defines a museum of four wings around a higher central volume. Paula Rego chose Eduardo Souto de Moura, and the building she got was not the one his earlier work would have predicted.
The ArchDaily archive puts it plainly. "With the Casa das Histórias, it can be said that Eduardo Souto de Moura has adopted an almost 'regionalist' approach, distancing himself from the modern abstractionism that has been a dominant feature of his work. It is, however, an uncritical regionalism that avoids the sense of 'resistance' which lay behind other attempts at the approach in Portugal in the 1980s." The reference points are specific: Raul Lino's pronounced palace roofs, the silos and lighthouses of the Palácio de Sintra silhouette, the inhabited chimney of the monastery kitchen at Alcobaça.
What that means on the ground in Cascais is a building of archetypes without ornament. The two pyramid towers are evacuated of religious or funerary reference and read instead as kitchen flues blown up to monument scale. The wings between them stay low, set back, in negotiation with the umbrella pines and olives the site insisted on keeping. Aldo Rossi's Scientific Autobiography argued for a modernity built from urban iconography rather than its negation. The Casa das Histórias is one of the cleanest tests of that argument anywhere.
The red is the move that does the most. Lanxess Bayferrox pigment driven into the UNIBETÃO mix renders the concrete a flat, slightly chalky vermilion that softens under overcast sky and goes almost terracotta at the corners where rain has worked it. From across the garden the surface reads as a single saturated plane. The triangular faces hold light differently from the rectilinear wings beneath them, splitting the building into two registers that the same pigment binds together.
Inside, the plan loops 750 square metres of galleries around a higher central room for temporary work, finished in neutral white with the blue-grey marble of Cascais underfoot. A 200-seat auditorium and a café opening to the garden complete the programme. Paula Rego's brief asked for a museum that met every technical requirement of the type without forgetting the warmth a visitor expects of a house. The colour is for the approach. The pacing is for the work.
What surprises faithful followers, and confounds the harshest critics, is how unembarrassed the historicism is. There is no irony in the pyramid, no quotation marks around the chimney. The building reads as a museum that took an instruction from Rossi and an instruction from Lino and arrived at something neither would have built, planted in the only landscape that could hold it: south, southern, hot enough in July that the red goes from pigment to ground.
