Portuguese architecture has been consistently characterized over the last several hundred years by the remarkably placid nature of its forms and details. A highly limited palette has been reworked many times, almost to the extent that the process runs counter to the experience of most changing, modernizing countries. Whereas modernity is often heralded by the arrival in a small village of a new building marked with the sophistications of the big city, or a foreign education (as, for example, is the case across Ireland now), in Portugal, it often seems that it is the whitewashed character of simple village architecture that is increasingly making itself felt in the big cities, often at the hands of the country's leading architects. Whether the forms are drawn from the pitched roofs of the granite north, the orthogonal, colonnaded farmhouses of the centre, or the rendered, blocky, cabins of the south, the same features predominate - a very few windows; flat walls with a horizontal emphasis; a close connection to the earth; very little timber; reductive detailing and flush junctions; a sense of tightness, rather than enclosure. And, above all, the only true colour, heavenly blue, emanating from the intensity of the Iberian sky.
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