When João Archer de Carvalho joined the Hidroeléctrica do Douro (HED) company in July 1953, it marked the beginning of one of the most influential developments in Portuguese architectural culture in the second half of the 20th century. At the time, the Estado Novo was strongly committed to investing in energy, a resource that was sorely lacking in Portugal. The modern architectural culture that had first openly revealed itself at the first National Architecture Congress in 1948 adapted naturally to the efforts in infrastructure building. At HED a team of architects trained in the “progressist” environment of the ESBAP (the Porto College of Fine Arts) in the 1950s, following the ideals of the Modern Movement, was completed the following year with the recruitment of two more young architects, Manuel Nunes de Almeida and Rogério Ramos (1927-1976). More architecture professionals joined latter, integrating the Architecture Department that was being set up and was to work exclusively for HED until 1969 . Working as a team, they were to become responsible for a wide range of hydro-power generation-related projects (power plants, residential designs and commercial and religious projects, amongst others) around the country, the beginnings of which were precisely in the Douro International area [the region of the River Douro on the border with Spain], in the form of the Picote, Miranda and Bemposta dam interventions.
     João Archer and Manuel Nunes de Almeida were born in Porto in 1928 and 1924 respectively. The former worked with João Andresen between 1949 and 1953, where he primarily worked on the urbanisation plans for Sernancelhe in 1951 and Penacova the following year and on the Lino Gaspar house (Caxias, 1954). The Caixas de Previdência residential estate in Bragança designed by the same firm, was the subject of the thesis he presented for his architect’s diploma in 1953 at ESBAP, for which he received the maximum grade of 20 points. The same year, Archer he worked on and off with Alfredo Viana de Lima, namely on the residential block on Rua da Costa Cabral in Porto. In 1951, together with Andresen he took part in the ODAM (Organisation of Modern Architects) works exhibition. He authored design projects with Rogério Ramos for private clients, such as the Clave record store in Rua Júlio Dinis in Porto, the Jorge Marques Guedes house in São Mamede de Infesta and the Shell petrol station in Matosinhos.  Of his institutional activities one can highlight his involvement in the northern Portugal branch of the National Union of Architects together with Eduardo Matos and José Carlos Loureiro. After he left EDP (Electricidade de Portugal) in 1994, he became a consultant to the group’s companies.
     Manuel Nunes de Almeida completed his CODA [architectural diploma examination] diploma in 1958 with a final grade of 19 points [out of 20]. Before joining HED, he worked with Fernando Eurico, an architect who was to later gain note for his work in Africa, and Anselmo Gomes Teixeira. In 1954 he co-designed, with the former two colleagues, two private residences (one in Costa Nova and the other in Chaves) and a fair stand at the Crystal Palace in Porto. He left EDP in 1990 and become a consultant in the field of the fine arts, sitting on the jury for the selection of exhibitions at the Cooperativa Árvore and being a member of the purchase committee, along with Bernardo Pinto de Almeida, Alexandre Melo and Fernando Pernes, for the contemporary art collection at the Serralves Foundation(1990-1996). In 2008, Braga City Council’s Museum of the Image organised the Vislumbres [Glimpses] exhibition of unpublished and “experimental” photographs collected by Nunes de Almeida between 1961 and 1965. He was also secretary of the Northern Portugal branch of the National Union of Architects.
     Together with Rogério Ramos, João Archer and Nunes de Almeida outlined some of the main “ideological” principles that were followed in the hydroelectric projects in the Douro International area. “Respect for the ‘site’; exclusion of vernacular forms; full compliance with function; and general detailing” – were some of the rules they defined for Picote, the general plan for which was launched in 1953. They called this the “second modernism” in opposition to the practice then emerging in Portugal with the development of knowledge on popular architecture as a result of the SNA survey launched in 1955, which placed national architecture in the axis of the criticism outlined by the “third way”. They preferred the path of continuity with the modern, denouncing the “regionalist decorativism” that made up a lot of the post-survey architectural output. This position was reflected in the “orthodoxy” with which they adhered to modern teachings, which was exemplified in the clear correlation between plans, elevations and volumes that the buildings reveal. The idea of “total design” – or “from the  spoon to the city”, as they called it – which included the design of objects for everyday use (furniture, tableware, fabrics, wall coverings, etc.), had a lot to do with the inexistence of a “contemporary design” offer by the industry and the market at the time. Parallel to this, they shared what they referred to as a “spirit of service, where only the best solutions are good enough”.
     For Picote, in a remote and unhumanised landscape, João Archer took responsibility for the power plant and the control and discharge building (1954-1958), as well as the specialists’ housing (1954-1964) while Nunes de Almeida devoted himself to the residential and commercial areas, i.e. the engineers’ houses and the shopping centre (1955-1958), which has since been decharacterised by recent works, the primary school (1954-1957) and the chapel (1958). Rogério Ramos left his mark on the hotel (1957-1959) and the water treatment plants. However, according to their own clarifications, one can regard these design projects as the result of a “veritable team spirit” and not individualised approaches by the respective designers.
     Of the group of built structures, the chapel by Nunes de Almeida became the most publicised building at the time, probably as a reflection of the debate on religious spaces opened in 1953 by the MRAR (Movement for the Renewal of Religious Art). Thus, in January 1959, an article by Costa Barreto was published in the Comércio do Porto newspaper highlighting the “intensity and pureness of its evangelical message derived from the functional and aesthetic intention that governed its concretisation”. The same author – this time in the arts review Colóquio: Revista de Artes e Letras, published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation – produced a second article on an exhibition of religious art in the Episcopal Palace in Porto in June 1959. In the exhibition, the new religious architecture designed “under the aegis of simplicity both in organisation of the internal space and the volumes” was exclusively illustrated with images of the Picote chapel.
     Between the 1950s and 1990s the energy generation scenario in Portugal underwent several changes. New strategies dictated the creation of new business structures. In 1969 HED and the remaining four companies that made up the primary network in the sector merged to create Companhia Portuguesa de Electricidade (CPE). After the 25th April Revolution, all the electricity companies were nationalised, resulting in the emergence of EDP in 1976. These successive alterations increased the field of work both territorially and programmatically for this design team, which remained active until reaching retirement age. Thus, while the architectural department at HED began to expand its field of action with the merger that created CPE, the formation of EDP meant that its projects were expanded to the whole national territory. Nunes de Almeida, e.g., designed the thermal power plants in Setúbal, Sines  (1988) and Pego (which he did not finish because he reached retirement age), the Sines and Fernão Ferro substations and the gas turbine plants in Tunes and Alto da Mina. João Archer was responsible, amongst other projects, for the Sacavém dispatch centre and the Beja distribution centre building. Before his premature death at the age of 49, Rogério Ramos also left a legacy of notable works, such as the Régua residential block and the Faia project – the reconstruction of a village flooded by the Vilar dam reservoir.
     Both João Archer and Nunes de Almeida always rejected the Brazilian influence attributed to them later by authors such as Domingos Tavares or Michele Cannatá and Fátima Fernandes, claims that were repeated in academic texts that reinforced the importance attached to their work recently. They prefer to see Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier as their mentors. They were most indebted, however, to the ESBAP reformed by Carlos Ramos and their contacts with other students such as their contemporaries Fernando Távora and Nadir Afonso.
     There has been a more widespread interest in their career since the Italian magazine Abitare dedicated a feature on them by Michele Cannatá and Fátima Fernandes entitled “Portogallo, architettura, ingegneria, territorio” (no. 338, 1995). This preceded the exhibition at the Porto Court of Appeal Museum, Hidden Modernity: the Architecture of the Douro Hydroelectric Power Plants, 1953-1964 in October 1997, which was curated by the same two architects. This show was later to form the basis for application for the classification of the Picote dam as a national heritage site by IPPAR in 2002.
     The two architects currently live in Porto, where they are still professionally active. Nunes de Almeida has preferred to remain in the field of the fine arts, while João Archer has gone into the area of architectural and town planning consultancy and, together with Alcino Soutinho, works for CAPC, a property development firm currently building a 1000-home development in Senhora da Hora in the city.|