This week, the Portuguese center for architecture Casa da Arquitectura (House of Architecture) celebrates the opening of its new premises in Matosinhos, Porto. In order to mark the occasion, the architecture museum has planned three days full of activities from the 17th to the 19th of November, with guided tours, performance, talks, music and films.
Within the new gallery spaces, Casa da Arquitectura will hold two exhibitions open to the public, including their inaugural exhibition Poder Arquitectura. Organised by the architects Jorge Carvalho, Pedro Bandeira and Ricardo Carvalho, the exhibition will be open until March 2018, with several talks and debates by national and international figures that have been involved in the exhibition scheduled to take place during this time.
The Casa da Arquitectura Gallery will also be hosting X BIAU, the exhibition of the Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism Biennial, that will feature part of the collection of Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, who won the 10th Ibero-American Award for Architecture and Urbanism last year. Souto de Moura will be a guest speaker during the Casa da Arquitectura's opening.
The opening weekend will include two conferences, with an eclectic guest panel, as part of “Please Share!”—an event organized by architect Roberto Cremascoli around the themes of curating and editing in architecture. “Tudo é Projeto," a film produced in collaboration with Casa da Arquitectura by Joana Mendes da Rocha and Patrícia Rubano, will be shown publicly as well.
An educational program involving virtual and augmented reality will also feature, in partnership with the DFL (Digital Fabrication Lab of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto). At the same time, there will also be the opportunity to take guided tours around the museum’s archives and exhibitions.
Casa da Arquitectura—Portugal’s Center for Architecture
Created in 2007, Casa da Arquitectura is a non-profit cultural body that is dedicated to the public’s interest in architecture by bringing together an exhibition space and archive. Its archives currently include over 500 models, panels, drawings, serigraphs, DVDs, books and other materials of the collections and estates of several architects, including Álvaro Siza, João Álvaro Rocha, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Fernando Távora and Souto de Moura, among others.
The new location takes up a group of buildings restored by the architect Guilherme Machado Vaz for the Municipality of Matosinhos, occupying an area of about 4,700 square meters.
Brazil’s presence in Casa da Arquitectura
The making of the Brazilian Architecture Collection, a collection of projects from the ninety-year period between 1927 and 2017, will be revealed in an exhibition open to the public. Curated by Fernando Serapião and Guilherme Wisnik, the exhibition “Modern and Contemporary Brazilian Architecture” will showcase diverse functional projects such as single-family residences, office buildings, industrial pavilions, cultural, religious and symbolic buildings, as well as projects on furniture, landscape architecture and urbanism.
The exhibition’s focal point is the design and construction of Brasília in the late 1950s and early 1960s, presenting the great synergy between architecture and other important artistic movements of the period such as Bossa Nova in the field of popular music, one of the best known Brazilian music genres. The exhibition presents Brazil as a modern country overcoming the stigma of its colonial past and its perception as an "underdeveloped" country, to become a protagonist in architecture.
More information is available at www.casadaarquitectura.pt
