Launching
THE IDEA OF ÁLVARO SIZA: CARLOS RAMOS PAVILION AND BOUÇA SOCIAL HOUSING by Mark Durden and João Leal
14 October | 18:30 | Fundação Instituto Arquitecto José Marques da Silva (FIMS)
PT/ENG
The launch and presentation of scopionewspaper journal “The Idea of Álvaro Siza: Carlos Ramos Pavilion and the Bouça Council Housing Project” will be attended by the photographers Mark Durden and João Leal who are the authors of this photography series focused on the work of Álvaro Siza, as well as by Nuno Grande, the architect and curator who writes the probing essay “In Praise of Light and Shadows" for this this series, as well as by Pedro Leão Neto the Director of scopionewspaper journal that has been curating and publishing the series collection The Idea of Álvaro Siza by Mark Durden and João Leal “.
The aim is to encourage an exploratory and critical debate between the various authors involved in this curatorial, photography and editorial work around the architecture of Álvaro Siza, namely this series focused on the Carlos Ramos Pavilion and the Bouça Council Housing Project. This series results from the work developed by the former two authors involving a selection of architectural buildings designed by Álvaro Siza for the series entitled “The Idea of Álvaro Siza”, which has been accompanied by research group AAI and Pedro Leão Neto since Mark Durden and João Leal began to photograph and select Siza´s buildings for this project in Portugal.
After a concise presentation about each of the authors, Pedro Leão Neto will briefly contextualizing the work of The Idea of Álvaro Siza and then will give the word to the photographers for a statement about their photographic experience of Siza's work, based on this series focused on the Carlos Ramos Pavilion and the Bouça Council Housing Project. In a second moment, the word will be given to Nuno Grande in order to understand how accordingly to his way of thinking as architect and curator the photography of Mark Durden and João Leal has captured essential aspects of Álvaro Siza´s work. The objective is to promote a critical debate about the world of photography and architecture, seeking to explore the singularity and significance of the relationships that can be established between the photographers and their artistic processes when communicating the architecture and key ideas of the architect, in this case The Idea of the Álvaro Siza.
This launch is an initiative of AAI/CEAU/FAUP | scopio Editions, in collaboration with the Marques da Silva Foundation.
It will take place at Palacete Lopes Martins and starts at 18h30.
Entrance is free, but subject to space capacity.
About scopionewspaper journal “The Idea of Álvaro Siza: Carlos Ramos Pavilion and the Bouça Council Housing Project” by Mark Durden and João Leal
scopionewspaper is an Architecture, Art & Image Research publication with a special interest in Photography as an instrument of inquiry and expression being one of the editorial collections of scopio Editions, being the editorial responsibility of the AAI research group (Architecture, Art and Image) integrated into the R&D center of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto called CEAU (Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies).
In this issue of scopionewspaper journal “The Idea of Álvaro Siza: Carlos Ramos Pavilion and the Bouça Council Housing Project” (# 1 December 2020), we feature the photography series by Mark Durden and João Leal focusing on the architecture of the Carlos Ramos Pavilion school building and the Bouça Council Housing Project, the product of their work in selecting architectural buildings designed by Álvaro Siza for the series entitled “The Idea of Álvaro Siza”, which I have been accompanying since they began to photograph and select Siza’s buildings for this project in Portugal.
Some of the works from this series “The Idea of Álvaro Siza” have also been included in the set of case studies on Contemporary Photography Projects in Portuguese Architecture in Visual Spaces of Change (VSC), a publicly funded research projected coordinated at FAUP by the Architecture, Art and Image (AAI) group at the CEAU Research Centre. The thematic gallery of VSC where this photography project is incorporated is concerned with contemporary photography projects that combine various artistic strategies applied to the universe of architectural photography. It understands architecture as both subject and artistic matter, able to be of particular interest to a specialized public, as well as accessible to the general public through publications either in book form or online in its digital collection. The VSC research project and its galleries of diverse contemporary photography projects seeks to help advance the internationalization, dissemination and visibility of Oporto city spaces, its architecture and cultural memories. This will be achieved mainly through its online platform and diverse publications in books, catalogues and special editions, as is the case of this collection in scopionewspaper “The Idea of Álvaro Siza”.
“The Idea of Álvaro Siza” is a Contemporary Photography project that recognises architecture as both subject and artistic matter and explores a visual strategy that moves away from traditional mainstream architectural photography. In this series Mark Durden and João Leal are seeking to expand the comprehension of architecture by investigating photography’s capacity as a unique form of expression able to create an architectural promenade in which the images move between documentary and poetical depictions. Through their series, the viewer is able to sense both the magical experience that Siza’s architectural spaces produce for us and how light and nature interplay within those spaces. Furthermore, their photographs reveal how Siza’s spatial forms relate with the context, offering a deeper understanding of the architect’s oeuvre.
We are honoured to have the architect, cultural programmer and curator Nuno Grande as our invited author for this issue of scopionewspaper journal, in which he offers insightful reading in “In praise of light and shadows”, about Mark Durden and João Leal´s series “The Idea of Álvaro Siza: the Carlos Ramos Pavilion and the Bouça Council Housing Project”.
Editorial and Advisory Board
Architecture, Art and Image (AAI) research group Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto
scopio Editions
ISBN: 978-989-54878-4-4
ISSN: 2183-6906
Critical essays
"In praise of light and shadows"
by Nuno Grande
The interaction of light and shadow has always fascinated architects, and even more so since Le Corbusier’s famous quote from 1923, published in Vers une Architecture, in which he describes architecture as “the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light”. This game, which thus motivated the painters of Purism and Cubism – among whom Le Corbusier would come to be included – contributed in great part to the definition of the aesthetic ideals of the artistic avant-garde in the West in the first half of the 20th century. Associated with the purity of crystal, with the idea of total transparency, and with the blurring of the boundaries between the interior and the exterior, this very same game served as the conceptual premise of (and later as a critical challenge to) the architecture of the Modern Movement.
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The photographic work of Mark Durden and João Leal focusing on Álvaro Siza’s work in Porto – now published by Scopio Newspaper – goes in search of not only this same game of shadows upon the target surfaces of the façades and the interiors of the buildings but also the multiplicity of transparencies and penumbras that unfold through their ample glazed windows.
The photographs do not shun the presence of nature, of the inhabitant, or of the citizen; to the contrary, they seek out these precise moments of the day in which, at the same time, the trees are reflected or cast shadows on Siza’s architecture and in which the human presence-absence is revealed in the objects or graffiti left on it. It is as if, for Mark Durden and João Leal, Siza’s works were blank pages waiting for daily life to be written or printed upon them.
This perspective “upon” the walls or “through” the windows of the building takes on a near ghost-like character, something that is reinforced by its colourless tone, intentionally created by overexposure to the milky light at dawn or dusk. In these images, one feels the spectral presence of Le Corbusier or Adolf Loos – depicted in the fenêtre en longueur, or in the small “eyes” of the Faculty of Architecture building – or perhaps Alvar Aalto or Bruno Taut, in the rhythm alternating between the stairs, verandas and galleries of the Bairro da Bouça. These phantoms “live” there, reminding us that the best architecture is always the result of a revisit with and a crisscrossing of countless memories.
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"A conversation with nature and the temporality of light/reflexes"
by Pedro Leão Neto
The series start by capturing the geometric forms and elements of some of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto´s buildings and it is clear from the start how light and reflections are the nuclear elements that are explored when responding to the edifices’ poetics and the geometries of the constructed forms. It is in the observation of the temporality of light/reflexes and in reimagining its realms within that the series offers another perspective on the FAUP spaces, one that is renewed, a perspective of a graceful understanding through the distortions and abstractions of the buildings’ structures.
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