Arquitectura e Instrução: o projecto moderno do liceu

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The projects carried out for Portuguese high schools between 1836 and 1936 allow for a transversal reading of the three themes that delimit and inform this study: education, architectural program, and modern architecture. The first theme establishes the relationship between politics and education through reforms in secondary education. The second defines the foundations for the construction of high schools based on pedagogical, hygienic, and constructive requirements. The third interprets the presented projects in the context of a new architecture: modern architecture.
In this sense, the high school buildings trace one of the multiple paths of Portuguese architecture in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, with the construction of a modern high school program being a parallel process to the construction of modernity itself. Thus, the high schools carry a modern rationalist culture, but also a classical character, developing modern architecture without avant-garde, serving as a bridge between Fine Arts and the Modern Movement.