Álvaro Siza’s work, beginning in 2004 and not yet completed, in designing Naples’ Municipio metro station represents a union of contemporary architecture and the city’s historical, cultural and archaeological context. The subway station, in the very center of the city, stands out for its ability to transform a simple work of transport mobility into a work of urban art, as well as in the transformation of the historic center, linking the 1930s maritime station with the new square. Siza – together with Eduardo Souto de Moura with Tiago Figueiredo – uses local materials, creates bright and welcoming spaces that dialogue with the historic environment. A large void that eliminates urban disarticulations, and that – inspired by the paintings and ancient representations of this part of the city – is inspired by local traditions, incorporating elements of the Neapolitan archaeological heritage, without ever losing sight of the functionality of the infrastructure. Through the project, Siza manages to connect the past and the future, bringing out a new urban identity. His work contributes to improving urban quality and reducing the gap between different areas of the city, promoting new urban spaces. In this way, the Naples subway becomes a symbol of rebirth and innovation, albeit reflecting the praise do chaos that animates the city.
Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) and Fernando Távora (1923-2005) are key figures for understanding the architecture of Italy and Portugal in the second half of the twentieth century. The two architects are also linked by their shared interest in Japanese culture. Távora visited Japan in 1960; Scarpa in 1969, and again in 1978. They both visited the Katsura Imperial Villa. The drawings that Távora made at the time and the notes he took about the villa reveal a certain awe and fascination. Távora confirmed that all of the so-called Modern was there. The accounts of Scarpa’s visit to the villa show an almost religious and, at all times, contagious enthusiasm, which was confirmed by his son, Tobia Scarpa (b. 1935). The paper aims to compare Japan’s meanings and architecture in the works of Carlo Scarpa and Fernando Távora, based on their visits to Katsura Imperial Villa. It revisits the modernity of this seventeenth-century Japanese architectural masterpiece.
Following the outbreak of the Portuguese Revolution on April 25, 1974, and the subsequent creation of SAAL – a semi-state service supporting citizen-led housing initiatives – Italy showed a strong and growing interest in the Portuguese experience. This was first reflected in a series of articles published in major architectural journals, and in the release of Politica e Progetto. Un’Esperienza di Base in Portogallo, the first book dedicated to SAAL. That interest later materialized in the organization of a travelling exhibition across the main schools of architecture in Italy, under the direction of Emilio Battisti and Francesco Marconi, and featuring the participation of Álvaro Siza, Alexandre Alves Costa, and Nuno Portas. The exhibition emerged as a unique moment of cultural exchange, marking the first international presentation of SAAL and prompting the Portuguese architects to construct a narrative around their recent experience. From Turin to Palermo, the three architects travelled across the Italian peninsula, presenting the SAAL process to professors and students, and fostering a meaningful dialogue between the architectural cultures of the two countries. Reconstructing this experience offers the opportunity to identify the key figures who played a decisive role in the dissemination of SAAL in Italy, while investigating their relationships and contributions within a particularly active and dynamic cultural context.
This contribution aims to explore the cultural and architectural dynamics between Italy and Portugal during the 1930s and 1940s, focusing on the significance of the cultural exchanges between the two countries in promoting a sense of “shared Latinity” and in diffusing the Italian language and architectural culture within the Lusitanian context. A series of initiatives such as the journal “Italian Studies in Portugal” and university courses offered by the Italian Cultural Institute aims to show the crucial role played by urban planning projects in consolidating the relationships between the two countries. Under the direction of people such as Aldo Bizzarri and Guido Vitaletti, the Italian Cultural Institute has organized exhibitions, conferences, and translations that fostered a rich and multifaceted cultural exchange. Within this cultural climate, collaborations in the field of city urban planning were started between Italian architects such as Marcello Piacentini and Giovanni Muzio. This contribution investigates the lesser-known aspects of these exchanges, enabling a deeper understanding of the cultural interactions between Italy and Portugal. Through the analysis of archives and unpublished documents, this study aims to clarify how these relationships shaped Portuguese architecture and cultural identity, highlighting the impact of Italian urban theories on the urban models applied in Porto and, reflexively, on the Estado Novo’s urban policies.
This article examines the exchanges between Italy and Portugal until the 1970s, demonstrating how Italian architectural culture informed, though not entirely determined, Portuguese project culture during and after the Estado Novo. Drawing on Portuguese journals, archives and built works, it identifies distinct phases of reception: the late 1940s engagement with Casabella and E. N. Rogers; the 1950s–60s appropriation of neo-rationalist methods; and the post-1974 assimilation of Tendenza. Central to this inquiry is the figure of Távora, whose network of Italian interlocutors (Gardella, Albini, Rogers) and dissemination of their discourse through the Inquérito (IARP) furnished decisive resources for the emerging Oporto School. The article further reconstructs Siza’s early formation, mediated through Távora, Italian publications, and “Italian” readings of Aalto and Loos, tracing how his compositional principles evolved distinctly after the Revolution. Among the archival evidence examined is Silvia Viana de Lima’s 1960 translation of Rogers’ essay “L’Architettura moderna dopo la generazione dei Maestri,” that reveals the depth of Portuguese engagement with Milanese discourse. The article contends that the Oporto School, while deeply indebted to Italian neo-rationalism, synthesized these conceptual instruments with vernacular traditions, late Nordic modernism, and revolutionary imperatives. A disciplinary position shaped by specific conditions: delayed modernization under dictatorship and subsequent post-revolutionary transformation. The study challenges historiographies that assimilate the Oporto School into the narrative of modern movement continuity, arguing that no full modernism took root in Portugal under the Estado Novo. Postwar Portuguese architecture is positioned instead as a belated but consequential “realistic postmodernity”, a third way forged through transnational dialogue, in which Italian neo-rationalism played a constitutive rather than incidental role.
Portuguese architectural culture is historically determined by its relations with Italy, which have intensified since the 16th century, both in education through the influence of treaties and study tours, and by the growing migration of Italian architects and artists working in Portugal and the colonies. However, there are fewer examples of Portuguese architects working in Italy, such as the exemplary cases of Alfredo de Andrade (1839–1915) and Álvaro Siza (1933–). With support on unpublished archival research and field work, this article proposes an analysis of intervention works in pre-existing buildings by Andrade and Siza in Italy, between the end of the 19th century and the 21st century. In both cases, drawing is the privileged instrument of research and design, along with a solid artistic and architectural culture that allows them to find sensible responses to the specificities of each context by respecting the historical layers and adding new elements within a delicate modernity in continuity with tradition.
This article investigates the profound and enduring intellectual relationship between two pivotal figures in European architectural culture, Vittorio Gregotti and Álvaro Siza, framed by the concept of Siza’s “otherness.” Gregotti was instrumental in introducing Siza to the international scene, starting with his 1972 article in Controspazio, establishing a critical matrix that interpreted Siza’s work through its distance from prevailing ideological and dogmatic trends. The paper traces the origins of this elective affinity back to the Italian-Luso-Iberian architectural meetings (Pequeños Congresos) of the 1960s, highlighting how Siza’s context-specific practice resonated with Gregotti’s critical position, particularly his focus on “anthropo-geography”. A central argument is the reciprocity between small and large scales, demonstrated by Siza’s design process, which uses drawing not merely as representation, but as a slow, multi-scalar tool to reveal the latent potential of a place. Gregotti promoted this perspective through exhibitions (Venice Biennale 1976, Milan 1979) and through his editorship of Casabella, notably by publishing Siza’s large-scale project for the Quinta da Malagueira in Évora, showcasing a concrete alternative to normative urbanism. Finally, the article explores Gregotti’s interpretation of the ideas of “tradition” and “foundations”. Siza’s architecture is presented as embodying a “critical distance” from reality - a search for the “hypothesis of the future” rooted in the empirical conditions of the context, rather than in abstract theory or historical consensus. Ultimately, the otherness of Siza, defended by Gregotti, affirmed architecture as a “project of critical dialogue” -a model of social commitment rooted in the reality rather than utopia.
It may seem like a pretext – and it is a pretext! – but the existence of the Brera Astronomical Observatory (1764) raises several questions of Italian-Portuguese scope: (1). the presence in Portugal of astronomers and mathematicians from the Society of Jesus, professors at one of the most qualified schools of European cosmography from the 17th-18th century – the Aula da Esfera, in Lisbon; (2). the leading role of Italian astronomers in the “golden” years of the reign of D. João V, in Portugal and in overseas territories, in the development of observation of the stars, in topography, terrestrial and cosmic geography and in the measurement of Time, be it, or not updated by the Copernican proposals; (3). and the memory of the oldest observatories in the kingdom of Portugal, contemporary with the notable Milanese scientific structure. The scope of marginalized architecture also arises here, serving as a reminder of multiple scientific achievements with repercussions on eighteenth-century architecture. Our aim is to reactivate these “places of memory”, some of them humble testimonies (the “meridian” of the Mafra Convent), others just narrated memories (the observatories of the Colégio de Santo Antão – today Hospital de S. José – or the observatory of the Paço da Ribeira, the Arsenal Cosmochronometro), others still brought to us with rigorous documentary vigor, although demolished or never built and giving rise to a work of crypto-history of architecture (as with the project of the large observatory of the University of Coimbra; then the small observatory that was “de facto” built and later demolished in the middle of the 20th century), others that still exist (such as the Tower-Observatory of Paço da Bemposta; the site of the Escola Politécnica Observatory; and Tapada da Ajuda Observatory) as a fleeting but real presence of those past times that our century must preserve and revive. A heritage challenge for our time.
The essay discusses the affinities, exchanges and collaborations between Álvaro Siza (b. 1933) and Vittorio Gregotti (1927–2020) from the late 1960s to the present. Although they belonged to different geographical and cultural contexts, Siza and Gregotti developed an intense friendship and collaboration over the decades, based on a similar interpretation of the architectural phenomenon centred on the problematic relationship with the place, the tension towards the construction of the city, and the emphasis devoted to the design method rather than the development of a personal style. The text discusses the ways in which they met, Gregotti’s early reception of Siza’s architecture, the cultural and design pressures that fostered their mutual understanding, and finally analyses a little-known project - the residential neighbourhood in the Teatinos area in Malaga (1992) – which, despite never being realised, was the first and only occasion in which Gregotti and Siza shared a professional commission on a significant scale and complexity.
On the margins and, therefore, little known, is the relationship between Italy and the most performant trains on the Portuguese railway network. One of the most important cases was the advent of Lisbon-Porto-Lisbon line of Fiat Ferroviaria’s self-propelled diesel-hydraulics trains, named in Portugal, “Foguete”, known internally as “CP class 0500”. The travel time between the two cities was 4.30 hours, only surpassed since 1993, - and with the protagonism of another product designed by Fiat Ferroviaria (today Alstom-Italia).
The portrayal of the city traversed on a scooter (sulla Vespa! – noblesse oblige), emerging from Nanni Moretti’s cinematic imagination, positions itself as a “motorised” device for a Situationist dérive. Beneath the apparent guise of erratic, solipsistic wandering, the narrative rescues from everyday invisibility an ideological interpellation—where unresolved material contradictions surface once filtered through a Situationist lens. The supporting structure (the film), grounded in specific visual and sonic qualities—through the layering of a narrative (with its own time or concrete duration) and scenographic figuration—is reconfigured according to an alternative (in)disciplinary framework. The proposed methodology aims for a subtitling exercise, critically comparing representations of the city – a journey from Rome to Lisbon, mediated by Le Corbusier's prodigious imagination (collectively appropriated in favour of a popular revolution) – that reveal, by contrast, hidden meanings within routine appropriation based on use-value. Through plausible connections with architectural history and theory, paradoxical urban representations are confronted, using the narrator-protagonist’s fictional anxieties as a pretext for dissensus. The text ultimately seeks to help distinguish, through such defamiliarisation, differences in the political understanding of the subject and their place in the world.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, several authors—drawing, whether directly or indirectly, upon the aesthetic legacy of Immanuel Kant—sought to bring architecture closer to the realm of “pure” art. They advanced the view that architecture constitutes an autonomous discipline, governed by an internal logic independent of practical function or social circumstance. This conception of autonomy left a lasting imprint on architectural theory, particularly from the 1960s onwards, when its translation into architectural practice revealed enduring tensions between the freedom of form and the constraints of material and social reality. In the following decade, autonomy emerged as one of the defining themes of postmodern discourse, as various thinkers radicalised the notion by proposing a self-referential architecture—one that explored the inner logic of space and form as an autonomous system of meaning. Yet this Kantian understanding of architectural autonomy did not remain without its critics. Theorists such as Peter Bürger and Manfredo Tafuri argued that the idea of absolute autonomy is, in itself, an illusion, for architecture is unavoidably enmeshed in economic, political, and social contexts. This article argues that the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza occupied a singular position within the architectural culture of those years, participating in the debates on autonomy that, at the time, animated the postmodern controversy led by figures such as Colin Rowe in the United States and Manfredo Tafuri in Europe. It is a debate that, even today, continues to define the essential question of architecture’s role and its ethical responsibility.
The text examines the figure and work of Alcino Soutinho within the context of Portuguese architectural culture in the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on his position within the so-called “School of Porto” and on his long-standing engagement with Italian architectural thought. Particular attention is given to the formative impact of his extended study trip to Italy in 1961, which established a durable framework of references and critical tools rather than a superficial adoption of stylistic models. The author traces the cultural and disciplinary influences that shaped Soutinho’s autonomous and coherent approach to design, characterised by a deliberate distance from the construction of a personal language and from the communicative and mediatic imperatives of contemporary architecture. Soutinho’s work is interpreted not as eclectic or linguistically pluralistic, but as the outcome of a rigorous design practice grounded in constructive logic, typological clarity, a strong sense of belonging to the ground, careful control of space and light, and an ethical attention to use, durability and maintenance. Through the discussion of key projects – including interventions within historical contexts, civic buildings and large-scale territorial works – the text highlights a poetic stance that privileges the collective, material and often implicit dimensions of architectural knowledge, relegating language to a subsidiary role within a complex and balanced process. In this perspective, Soutinho’s contribution emerges as fundamental in preserving the plurality and critical depth of Porto’s architectural culture, countering the risk of stylistic academism and offering a lesson in restraint, continuity and responsibility that remains highly relevant to contemporary debates on architectural identity and practice in Europe.
Since its foundation, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon has been instrumental in the revitalisation of the Portuguese cultural scene, primarily through the provision of scholarships for architects and artists to pursue their studies in foreign countries. The article is grounded in research conducted in the Gulbenkian Foundation archives, drawing upon the experiences of several architects who elected to benefit from the scholarship by pursuing studies in Italy, focusing on aspects of Italian architectural culture that could not be fully developed in Portugal due to its dictatorial regime. Among them was Diogo Lino Pimentel (1934-2019), who applied for a scholarship to study in Bologna under Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro, at the “Centre for Study and Information on Sacred Architecture”. It was at this institution that the bond between Bologna and Lisbon was strengthened, and that a friendship was established between Pimentel himself and the architects Glauco and Giuliano Gresleri. The archival research was conducted in two distinct areas: firstly, the reading and analysis of the official documents that Pimentel delivered to the Foundation, the so-called “Relatorios”; and secondly, research carried out in private archives, from which a parallel narrative emerged through personal accounts. This text aims to recount some crucial moments in this journey, which will also allow us to examine two political and social situations, those of Bologna and Lisbon, at a specific and crucial moment in time: the 1960s.
This article investigates the relationship between Tomás Taveira, a prominent and controversial figure of postmodern architecture in Portugal, and Alessandro Mendini, a member of Studio Alchimia, one of the most radical groups within the Italian postmodernist context. During a period marked by intense societal questioning of the concepts of taste and value, both architects emerged as key figures of the postmodernist movement. This research—unprecedented in both Portugal and Italy—explores this unique connection by focusing on a comparative analysis of architectural and design works representative of each. These case studies reveal aesthetic and conceptual parallels, further enriched by an exclusive interview with Tomás Taveira and previously unpublished visual materials from the author’s private collection. The study offers a perspective on the impact of postmodernism in architecture, highlighting the creative interplay between Portugal and Italy.
This article explores the relationship between Portugal and Italy in the world of architectural culture, through personal experience, academic training and professional practice at the Porto School of Fine Arts – during a period when little information in Portugal was published about architecture – and how some of the first major influences came from Italy, namely from Aldo Rossi and Vittorio Gregotti through Casabella. Through the student publication Páginas Brancas, the theme of attempting to understand the idea of the architectural School that was being formed, in close relation to the work of Italian architects, was also explored. Outside the School of Fine Arts, the lessons learned through studio work with Eduardo Souto Moura were explored, namely the influence of Italian architects, including Carlo Scarpa, Ignazio Gardella, Franco Albini, Giorgio Grassi, among others. This article argues that architecture is the result of a continuous process of learning and cultural absorption and that its slow digestion happens over time. In this sense, in the architectural culture of Portugal, Italy is very much present, proving the strong relationship between the two countries and the strong influence of each country on the other.
The paper intends to analyse how the magazine Casabella interpreted the “phenomenon of a School in Porto” (understood as a field of frequent relations and not as a historicist identification) and to comprehend how themes and projects pertaining to that context were used to orient the cultural debate in Italy. Between Gregotti’s editorship, starting with Évora’s “manifesto”, and the last issue of Dal Co’s editorship dedicated to the designers of the new generation, twenty issues of the magazine published between 1982 and 2017 were selected and studied in order to organise a reflection on the narrative strategy that illustrated the evolution of the collective and simultaneously composite research of different generations of Porto architects. The paper aims to investigate how the Porto experience has oriented the Italian architectural debate of the last forty years by setting up a reasoning on some bridging themes that accumulate the two cultural contexts. Through the analysis of some published projects and the words of protagonists and scholars, arguments for a critical practice of architecture will be isolated and the presence of shared values among the various generations of architects will be verified, despite a great variety of languages and independent research paths that have defined links, discontinuities, common roots and personal autonomies.
