Italian architect and architecture historian Paolo Portoghesi, the first director of the Venice Architecture Biennale, passed away at the age of 92 in Calcata, Italy, as reported by the organization today, Tuesday, May 30.
In 1979, Portoghesi was appointed as the director of the Architecture branch of the Venice Biennale. That same year, he commissioned Aldo Rossi to design the Teatro del Mondo, which was moored on the Punta della Dogana in the San Marco Basin. Performances of the Biennale Teatro, directed by Maurizio Scaparro, were held there.
In 1980, Portoghesi invited twenty international architects, including Ricardo Bofill, Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki, Hans Hollein, Rem Koolhaas, Franco Purini, Laura Thermes, Denise Scott-Brown, John Rauch, and Robert Venturi, to design life-size facades for a 70-meter-long fictitious street inside the Corderie dell'Arsenale. This fake street, known as Strada Novissima, was open to the public for the first time and marked the inception of the first International Architecture Exhibition of the Biennale, entitled "The Presence of the Past." Three years later, Portoghesi was appointed President of the Biennale, a position he served until 1992.
Among his architectural works, four projects stand out: the Papanice House (1968), the Mosque and Islamic Cultural Center in Rome (1984-1995), the Renaissance district in the Parco Talenti in Rome (2001), and the Strasbourg Mosque (2012). Meanwhile, as an academic, Portoghesi taught the History of Criticism at the University of Rome from 1962 to 1966. The following year, he became a Professor of History of Architecture at the Milan Polytechnic, where he served as dean from 1968 to 1976. Since 1995, he had been teaching design at the faculty of architecture at the University of Rome.
