About

Every year we offer the wider public free access to Lisbon’s architecture during a weekend. Each edition celebrates a renewed selection of private and public spaces, contemporary or historic. This dialogue brings citizens closer to the design that sustains a vibrant city to live, work and learn, through visits to spaces usually inaccessible, urban itineraries unveiled by experts and even sound walks to do at any time. With a wide variety of Junior and Plus programmes, and accessible tours, you can choose what appeals most to your curiosity, interest or convenience. It’s in your hands!

The 13th edition curated by Sandra Marques Pereira and Alexandre Marques Pereira will be held on 11 and 12 May 2024: get to know this new edition.

OHL is a weekend-long festival that includes dozens of spaces with different uses and features. The visits are all free, some subject to prior booking, and with a choice of three formats: on your own, accompanied by an expert or by the volunteers who are the life and soul of this annual event.

See the list of spaces available to visit in this edition, find out the opening times for each one (and make your booking if necessary a week before the event starts).

In addition to visits inside buildings, it also includes:
• Urban walks accompanied by experts
• Narrated sound walks, which can be downloaded and done at any time

Some spaces have Plus events: concerts, screenings, performances, exhibitions, installations or workshops. The Junior activities offers challenges and activities for the younger ones and an accessibility programme adapted to blind, low vision, deaf or cognitive impaired people.

Founded in 1992 by Victoria Thornton, the Open House Worldwide network is now in 60 cities around the world, such as London, New York, Buenos Aires, Lagos ou Seoul, with about two million visitors in 2019 alone.

In Lisbon, the Triennale has made spaces of different natures accessible to the public since 2012: monuments, theatres, private houses, schools or churches, creating opportunities to discover places that demonstrate the decisive role of architecture in people’s lives and illustrate the value of built heritage. In 2015 and 2016, the Triennale also launched Open House Porto involving Casa da Arquitectura. Always looking for new ways to experience Lisbon, OHL 2020 debuted a new format, proposing a reinterpretation of the capital with sound walks guided by the imagery of some very special Lisboners. In 2021 and 2022 the Open House sailed to the south bank of the Tagus and expanded its territory to Almada.

The Lisbon Architecture Triennale has organised the OHL since its first edition, and in partnership with EGEAC since 2015.

The Triennale is a non-profit, founded in 2007, devoted to promote research, encourage debate and inspire transformation through architecture. Every three years, we hold a major forum for discussion, reflection and dissemination that crosses disciplinary and geographic boundaries. We also organise architecture cycles of conferences and events at the cultural cluster where we are headquartered — the Palácio Sinel de Cordes.