CISTERCIAN ARCHITECTURES IN PORTUGAL: Insertion in the territory and the actuality of its rehabilitations (presented at THE 2004 CISTERCIAN STUDIES CONFERENCE in conjunction with the 39 th Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies / Western Michigan University 6-9 May 2004 / Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA more

This paper aims to formulate a question, in which is equationed the way a  cistercian monastery can be understood as a territorial organism which is inserted in a territory in the way that it adapts the territory, modelling and altering it according to its needs but also as an urban organism in the way in that can be understood as having urban characteristics or even as making integral part of urban reality contributing to its development.
This approach will be based on the cistercian legacy in Portugal through a systematic analysis of the cistercian existences, its appropriation and insertion in the territory.  So that this contextualization to be possible, it’s necessary to proceed to the identification of the territorial keywords, which provided the existence of these architectures in Portugal, as well as its integration, its transformation and its permanence in the territory. Besides the geographical and topographical approach it will be also necessary historical, architectonic and urban approaches providing a typology scheme for the chosen sites. In fact, this system should be faced not only as the group of these architectures, but also its rehabilitations, reutilizations and alteration of meanings. The relationship between cistercian architecture and actuality is deeply linked to the subject of how to rehabilitate, which are the actions and the strategies to be used as well which are the methods instruments applied (ex. the importance of Alcobaça’s Charter, June 1998).
How can an ideal of monastic space, based in a specific plan be translated into a material reality? And how does it converge in an appropriation of the ideal space that changes and some times originates cities? How the monastic heritage does interact with the contemporary urban or rural territory? That is, from the planned to the spontaneous, from the regular to the irregular, from the ideal to the reality.