Matinha

An organ does not play so much as breathe. Air moves through a wooden chest until it finds an open valve and rises into a pipe that knows only one note, because the length of each pipe decides its voice.

The long pipes hold the low notes that you feel in the floor before you hear them and the short ones sing high and thin up near the vaults. A single pipe is only a sound, but set in rows by the hundreds it becomes music, which is why Mozart called the organ the king of instruments.

On the eastern edge of Lisbon where the city meets the Tagus there is a piece of ground that has been silent for a long time. Matinha was farmland once before it became the city’s gas works in 1944, when coal came in by rail and gas went out through the pipes beneath the streets and the district of Marvila grew up around the sound of it. For decades this was where Lisbon kept its machinery between the river on one side and the railway on the other, until the industry left and the ground fell still with only four round gasometers left standing to remember it.

AQA’s project gives the site its voice again. The towers rise in terracotta with vertical fins of fired clay running the full height of each façade, gathering close and then opening and then gathering again so that they read as the pipes of an instrument. Plants spill down between them from the terraces, and in a landscape of steel and concrete and rust the building arrives warm and bright in the colour of earth that has passed through fire.

“I call architecture frozen music.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Matinha is an instrument built on silent ground where the industry played its last note long ago, and the towers are here to play the next one.