Primavera Tardia (2021, Dafne), co-authored with Tiago Silva Nunes, is one of the five finalists nominated to the prestigious Iberian architectural prize Premis FAD 2022 in the category “Pensamento y Critica”. You can read the jury’s review here.
We are very honored to be nominated to this prize and we send our warmest congratulations to all the other finalists and selected authors.
The presentation of the book Primavera Tardia, co-authored with Tiago Silva Nunes, will be this Wednesday, 17 November at Centro Cultural de Belém-Garagem Sul, Lisbon.
You can read more about the book here.
Rome Stock Exchange, in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse (1962)
Please consider the call for papers of the SAH 2022 Conference, and the panel "Architecture, Capital and the Financial Turn: 1970–2020," which I will be chairing, and join us in Pittsburgh next year:
Architecture, Capital and the Financial Turn: 1970–2020
Currently, one of the most challenging issues for the history of architecture is the development of methods with which to examine architecture as capital. The discipline needs ways to analyze architecture as part of a complex process that includes the creation of capital in its many forms, not only financial, but also cultural, social and symbolic.
In the period between 1970 and 2020, new housing policies and financial instruments were developed which created a financial turn, when new types of extractive logics in the economy appeared through the exploitation of material properties and the creation of abstract financial instruments. The analysis of architectural production during this period, in parallel with the overlapping fields of economic and social policy, may shed light on other events that occurred in the expanded socioeconomic context, such as the global financial crisis of 2008, and moreover will illuminate the current context of growing social inequality and the emergence of a global housing crisis.
This panel welcomes papers that focus on the production of architecture as capital in its expanded forms (financial, social, cultural and symbolic); that map the relationships between architectural production and financialization; and that address different social and geographical contexts with global resonance. The aim of the session is to develop a critical perspective about capital and architectural practices within the social and political contexts of the recent past.
Session Chair: Eliana Sousa Santos, University of Coimbra
Submit your abstract through the SAH website:
The library at ISCTE selected Branco a Branco — White Salts White Sands (2019) as the book of the month. A copy of the book is on display at the library. They also produced a brochure and a short video about book, in Portuguese.
Branco a Branco — White Salts White Sands (2019) is for sale here.
I am happy to announce that I have been one of the five shortlisted curators by DGArtes to present a proposal for the Portuguese representation at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2020. I am honoured to share this distinction with the other shortlisted candidates: Célia Gomes, Luís Santiago Baptista, DEPA and Ponto Atelier.
You can read more about it here.
Tokyo Skyline
You can read news about our recent project in the Fellow’s blog of Fundação Oriente. In it we summarize the five different stages of our trip to Japan that we will narrate in five essays.
More news coming soon.
Aldo Rossi & Carlo Aymonino, Gallaratese, Milan
The fourth of a series of essays about the Alps as a center of European identity and the divisions between the countries that share the territory of that mountain range.
This essay follows the paths of artists, novelists, architects and filmmakers, who created and reenacted imaginary worlds around the landscapes of lake Como and the valley of the river Po. We are looking at the musings of Stendhal, Aldo Rossi and Luchino Visconti, among others.
The Portuguese newspaper Público is publishing this series of essays about art, architecture and culture I made with Tiago Silva Nunes.
You can read the fourth essay, in portuguese, here.
W.G. Sebald’s Walk, Wertach, Germany
This is the third of a series of essays about the Alps as a center of European identity and the divisions between the countries that share the territory of that mountain range.
It is a digression though the Swiss lakes where philosophers, artists and musicians took refuge during their exiles. We are following the migrations of Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Mann, as well as W.G. Sebald’s ritorno in patria.
The Portuguese newspaper Público is publishing this series of essays about art, architecture and culture I made with Tiago Silva Nunes.
You can read the third essay, in portuguese, here.
This is the second of a series of essays about the Alps as a center of European identity and the divisions between the countries that share the territory of that mountain range.
It is about the Swiss Alps as an object of scientific study, of artistic contemplation and of heroic hiking. We are following the walks of Mme. de Stäel, Mary Shelley, Louis de Broglie, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, John Tyndall, Leslie Stephen and ultimately, as before, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
The Portuguese newspaper Público is publishing this series of essays about art, architecture and culture I made with Tiago Silva Nunes.
You can read the second essay, in portuguese, here.
The Portuguese newspaper Público is publishing new series of travel essays about art, architecture and culture I made with Tiago Silva Nunes.
They are four essays about the Alps as a center of European identity and the divisions between the countries that share the territory of that mountain range.
The first essay is about the Arcadian character of the Pre-Alps and Provence, and we are following the walks of Simone de Beauvoir, Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier, and ultimately Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
You can read the first essay, in portuguese, here.
Within the scope of Fernando Tavóra Prize, I will give the lecture "America Deserta: Paisagem, Arte e Arquitectura do Sudoeste America" next Monday, October 2nd 2017, at Matosinhos City Hall.
This is the fifth essay of a series of five that I will be published at Jornal Público during this summer. It is based on the Travel Diary of my journey in the American Southwest. You can read it here.
This is the fourth essay of a series of five that I will be published at Jornal Público during this summer. It is based on the Travel Diary of my journey in the American Southwest. You can read it here.
This is the third essay of a series of five that I will be published at Jornal Público during this summer. It is based on the Travel Diary of my journey in the American Southwest. You can read it here.
This is the second essay of a series of five that I will be published at Jornal Público during this summer. It is based on the Travel Diary of my journey in the American Southwest. You can read it here.
This is the first essay of a series of five that I will be published at Jornal Público during this summer. It is based on the Travel Diary of my journey in the American Southwest. You can read it here.
Ivanpah Solar Electric, Nevada
The bright lights are the boiler towers of Ivanpah Solar Electric, they concentrate the energy of thousands of mirrors. In the 1980s, Reyner Banham described Solar One, also in the Mojave, as 'the most beautiful powerplant in the world'.At the time, Banham envisioned the structure as an aesthetic object to be visited as another artwork in the American desert.
Hoover Dam is the ultimate earthwork, a pharaonic infrastructure which mobilised thousands of workers. The convoluted structure with its Art Deco details is vaguely reminiscent of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. This dam is a national monument, celebrating the technical achievements of early C20.
Driving through the Great Basin desert, in Utah and Nevada, we visited 3 Earthworks. All three were sponsored by Virginia Dwan, the visionary gallerist and heiress of the 3M company - Minnesota, Mining & Manufacturing. It was at Dwan Gallery, in 1968, that the show Earth Works defined what would become sculpture in the 'expanded field'.
Michael Heizer's Double Negative
The temperature was over 45°C when we visited Michael Heizer's Double Negative. We arrived at noon, and addressed the visit as a scientific expedition. We went back and forth, like astronauts or divers. Heizer's artistic compulsions can be traced to many artifacts that we saw throughout our journey, as if he is tapping the American id: the tire marks at Bonneville Salt Flats, the monumentalization of extractive industries, the exhibition of human power over nature.