On 1 November 1755 a massive earthquake, followed by a tsunami and fires, destroyed much of Lisbon and killed tens of thousands. The king's chief minister, the Marquis of Pombal, directed the rapid rebuilding of the flattened downtown, the Baixa, on a regular grid of standardised streets and uniform classical façades. The new buildings used the gaiola, a timber lattice frame designed to flex and resist seismic shaking, with components prefabricated off site.
It produced one of the first rationally planned, standardised and explicitly anti-seismic reconstructions of a European city, an early model of disaster recovery through centralised, engineering-led urban design.