Iberia

What this cluster covers

Iberia is a peninsula of overlaid building cultures: Roman engineering, eight centuries of al-Andalus, Gothic and Manueline coastal wealth, then a twentieth century that produced two of the most careful architectural schools in Europe in Porto and Barcelona. The result is a landscape where a courtyard, a glazed tile and a whitewashed vault can each be traced to more than one tradition.

Climate does much of the design work. Deep shade, thick mass, small high openings, water in the courtyard and cross-ventilated rooms are not stylistic choices in Andalusia or the Alentejo — they are the reason those plans survive in a heating climate. The same logic reappears in modern Iberian work as controlled aperture, thermal mass and a preference for one good material over several.

Entries here cover azulejo and terracotta, lime and tadelakt-adjacent renders, rammed earth and adobe in the interior, Catalan thin-tile vaulting, and the restrained Portuguese and Catalan modernism that reinterpreted all of it. Places named include Lisbon, Porto, Madrid, Seville, Granada and Barcelona.