Duero Nórdico: la actitud Nórdica en la arquitectura de los Poblados Hidroeléctricos del Douro Internacional (1954-1965).

The construction of reservoirs over the 20th century has allowed for architecture  to play an active role in the duly auxiliary projects, many times using a most definite rationalist language. Just as the Tennessee Valley Authority did, who hired architect Roland A. Wank to design a new city next to the Norris Dam, a team of young architects from Porto (followers of the new trends lead by Le Corbusier or Gropius, but at the same time close to the lyrical values of a border landscape dyed with melancholy) were appointed to designed several linked hydroelectric complexes in the most depressed areas of Portugal in the 50s, bearing in mind the importance  of the location due to its natural value; the culture as a value in itself and the convoluted conditioning context of the proposal. This positioning, which would find in the northern reference its happiest manifestation as from the publication of several essays in Portuguese by Aalto, translates today as an architectonic landscape of omnipresent strength, and its example set in the hydroelectric complexes of Miranda do Douro, Picote or Bemposta is applicable to Saucelle or Aldeadavila, their authorship being entirely Spanish