Azulejo Now: The Tile Studios Open Their Doors
Lisbon has been making tiles for five hundred years and is still arguing about how. The studios in this trail sit on both sides of that argument, sometimes on the same street.
Kilns are opened on a published timetable so you can be there when a load comes out. It is the closest thing the city offers to a lottery draw.
Four of the eleven studios work to commission for restoration and are matching tiles laid in the 1750s, colour by colour, from recipes they will describe but not write down. The near-misses are stacked by the door and sold cheap.
Three studios run painting tables where you glaze a single tile and collect it fired a week later, or have it posted if you have gone home by then.
The trail is steep in both directions. The map hands out an order that keeps the climbing to one stretch.
Upcoming events
Paper and Press: Three Centuries of Dutch Type
Punches, matrices and proofs from Enschedé, laid out beside the machines that cut them.
Blue Hour: Cyanotypes from the Raval
Forty prints made with river water and morning sun, hung in a former dye works on Carrer de Joaquín Costa.
Form Follows Feeling: A Bauhaus Retrospective
One hundred objects that taught the century how to sit, read and pour. Curated with the Dessau archive.
Spiegelgasse Salon: Four Evenings of New Music
Four evenings in a first-floor room that seats sixty, with the composer in the third row each time.
Chromatic Studies: Albers to Now
Homage to the square, continued. Colour interaction from 1950 to the present in twelve rooms.
Refshaleøen Winter Market
Forty stalls in an unheated shipyard hall, open four hours a day for three weekends.