Igreja e Torre dos Clérigos, Porto

Granite here is made to move. The Igreja e Torre dos Clérigos is Porto’s great late-Baroque ensemble, designed by Nicolau Nasoni, and its restless curves, recesses and projecting details turn a hard local stone into theatre. The church, the bell tower and the connecting Brotherhood House read as one long composition across this steep site.

The church came first, built from seventeen thirty-two to seventeen forty-nine; the Brotherhood House followed, and the tower was finished in seventeen sixty-three. Its narrow front is deliberately tall in effect, with a dramatic spread of carved decoration around it. Inside, the church has an oval single nave beneath a dome, rather than the more conventional long rectangular space you might expect.

This was the home of a brotherhood created to support secular clergy facing poverty, illness and death. Nasoni devoted more than three decades to the whole project and was buried in this church; a crypt uncovered during recent restoration may contain his grave. Since nineteen ten, the complex has held National Monument status. It has become one of Porto’s defining images, but its real force is in the architectural dare: church and tower shaped as an extravagant granite performance.