“Winner of the Valmor Prize in 1975 and listed as a National Monument since 2010, the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is one of the most significant architectural works of the last half century in Portugal. However, paradoxically, it is one of the least well-known amongst the Portuguese, and one of the least remembered amongst architects. Indeed, it may actually have been one of the purposes of architects Nuno Teotónio Pereira (1922-2016) and Nuno Portas (1934-) to produce a work so diluted in the space of the city of Lisbon that it would go almost unnoticed, while enacting the true meaning of the Polis.

This book seeks to understand how this architectural project marks, simultaneously, the culmination of a process of maturation for its authors (1949-1961) and the prefiguration of an approach by the Catholic Church (Second Vatican Council) and the Portuguese society to larger urban and universal values, something that the Carnation Revolution would fully consecrate (1962-1974).

In the book, besides Nuno Grande’s text on that historical process, we can find sketches by the authors-architects, new blueprints of the compound, and recent photos by Márcia Lessa.”