City and Spectacle: A Vision of Pre-Earthquake

The study of a lost city is always a great challenge. The city of Lisbon that was destroyed by the 1755 earthquake is more than a distant memory. In fact, we are mainly in the presence of an absent memory, because it disappeared abruptly, leaving few records of its former existence.

Evidently, it is vaguely present in the districts around the castle, which were rebuilt outside of the adopted reconstruction plan. It is also perceptible through the existing fragmented and dispersed documents that survived the earthquake and Lisbon’s subsequent history.

However, the city centre that disappeared on 1 November 1755 was more than a vague collection of buildings, streets and alleys reminiscent of an extended past. It was a long-standing memory, consubstantiated in a lived urban and architectural setting that connected past and present. As such, it was able to generate, as all living cities are, a dialectic relationship between its material and social dimensions.

The long and significant historiography of pre-earthquake Lisbon has been shedding some light on this lost urban reality. However, it fails to clearly reveal its all-encompassing character and to enable a visual outlook of the city as a whole. The project City and Spectacle: A Vision of Pre-Earthquake Lisbon was thus devised as a virtual, interactive and immersive laboratory of research on the lost city of early eighteenth-century Lisbon.

It was able to put forward a first model for the Palace Courtyard area of the city. This was achieved by testing in a 3D interactive and immersive framework the most relevant data on the subject. In so doing, the project created new data, of a digital nature, that added to the information and knowledge on this period of Lisbon’s history. It also made available to a wide and diversified audience the possibility of a sensory revisit of the memory of Lisbon in a context of social interaction.

(Extracts from Murteira, Helena, Alexandra Câmara, Paulo Rodrigues, and Luis Sequeira. 2017. “Lost Cities as a Virtual Experience: The Example of Pre-Earthquake Lisbon” In Memories of a City, edited by Jonathan Westin and Ingrid Martins Holmberg, 57‒88. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg; Câmara, Alexandra, Helena Murteira, and Paulo Rodrigues. 2020. “Virtual Cities as Memoryscapes. The Case of Lisbon”. In Digital Cities between history and archaeology, edited by Maurizio Forte and Helena Murteira, 236- 256 New York: Oxford University Press).