City and Spectacle: a vision of pre-earthquake Lisbon

On the eve of the great earthquake of 1st November 1755, Lisbon was one of the most populated cities in Europe, a major sea port, international trading station and the political heart of an empire that extended from India to Brazil. From the 16th century, the Portuguese capital became a cosmopolitan city on which various foreign merchants and seafarers converged to visit or reside.

Portrayed by some travelers and foreign residents as a mixture of abject misery, extreme religious devotion and baroque opulence and extravagance, the old Lisbon became a mythical city for 18th century Europeans while for the Portuguese it has remained so until today. History has argued that the modernization of the medieval city took place as a result of the initiative of the Crown and the City Council with the providential help of Brazil’s gold and diamonds. After the earthquake, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo (b. 1699 – d.1782), the minister to King D. José (1750 – 1777, b. 1714) and future Marquis of Pombal, obtained the vital assistance of Portuguese military engineers to build a city with a regular layout arranged in uniform blocks. The old city with its particular morphological and social characteristics disappeared.

The destruction of Lisbon made the headlines in the European press at the time, not only because of its financial repercussions but above all due to the scale of the catastrophe. This occurrence inspired various texts of different kinds across Europe, notably Voltaire’s Candide ou l’Optimisme (1759), and had a significant impact on European 18th century thought.

The aim of this project is to use Second Life® technology to recreate the Lisbon destroyed by the 1755 earthquake and on which the Lisbon planned by the military engineers Eugénio dos Santos and Carlos Mardel was built.

It therefore consists of collaboration between two scientific approaches – historic and virtual language — thereby allowing the visualization of a memory.

Using written documentation and iconography found in archives and national museums, we propose to reconstitute the city, including not only the urban design but also the architectonic fabric of the whole and the interiors of the most noteworthy buildings, such as the Royal Palace in Terreiro do Paço, the Patriarchal See, the Opera House, the Corpus Cristi Convent and the All Saints Hospital. This re-creation will include an audio component that provides the background noise of city-dwellers, as well as performances of the opera and other noteworthy events of Lisbon of the time. It will be complemented by small texts giving the historical context. It thus strives to recreate the spatial, architectural, social and cultural dimensions of Lisbon in the early 18th century.

The entire project will be accessible to the public through an online portal that can be used simultaneously as:

• A pedagogical resource as it allows interactivity with the public by means of virtual visits and games that enable the physical component and day to day life of the city to be explored;
• An instrument to dynamize scientific debate and the sharing of documentary sources on Lisbon city, bringing together contributions from other national and international specialists.

The full modeling of the project using the Second Life® platform will also be made public. Second Life is a free, public virtual world that features persistent content and which runs over any operative system. The main features of Second Life as opposed to alternative technologies include: the ability to freely explore the environment by the users, in contrast with more rigid technologies that base themselves in pre-defined routes; the possibility of interactivity between the users themselves which allows the featuring of guided tours with didactic purposes, or the creation of events for wider audiences. Interactivity can take place with objects in the platform, which allows solutions of augmented reality also for didactic purposes. In addition, there are countless academic and cultural entities currently using the platform and this may lead to the creation of innovative synergies. Finally, the audience of Second Life is estimated to be 17 million people worldwide, with a positive yearly growth of 20%.

An object that is simultaneously pedagogical and recreational is to be given form by means of a three-dimensional interactive virtual reality that is grounded on a comprehensive study of urban phenomena from a historical and sociological perspective. This project stands out for its experimental and innovative character in the national context that gives both the general and specialized public an overall and detailed picture of an urban reality that has disappeared. The team brings together researchers in the area of Art History, specializing in the history of the city, urbanism, architecture and the landscape; specialists in the creation of virtual realities and experts in the application of IT resources to research and the dissemination of history.

Alexandra Gago da Câmara – Art Historian (Universidade Aberta/CHAIA – Universidade de Évora)

Ana Amaro – Designer (Universidade de Aveiro)

António Filipe Pimentel – Art Historian (Instituto de História de Arte – Universidade de Coimbra)

Aurora Carapinha –  Landscape Architect (CHAIA – Universidade de Évora)

Helena Murteira – Art Historian (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/CHAIA – Universidade de Évora)

Joaquim Ramos de Carvalho – Historian (Universidade de Coimbra)

Miguel Soromenho – Art Historian (IGESPAR – Instituto de Gestão do Património Arquitectónico e Arqueológico)

Paulo Simões Rodrigues – Art Historian (CHAIA – Universidade de Évora)

Rita Manteigas – Art Historian (Museu de Tavira)

Silvana Moreira – undergraduate student in Architecture (Beta Technologies)