Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation: The Latest Architecture and News

Back in 2019, Japanese architect Kengo Kuma won the contest to design the expansion of the gardens of the Gulbenkian Foundation and the new entrance of the Modern Collection of the Museum in Lisbon, Portugal. According to the architect, the museum can be a "wise example of the future as coexistence with the Earth and us", taking inspiration from nature and its relationship with architecture. In a recent No País dos Arquitectos podcast, Sara Nunes interviews Kengo Kuma and Rita Topa, architect at Kengo Kuma Associates, to talk about the expansion of the gardens and museum, along with the mission of architecture and the role of the architect, processes, and work references developed for the project.

Álvaro Siza's extensive personal archive of built and unbuilt projects is going online with free access, thanks to the collaboration between three institutions – the Serralves Foundation in Oporto, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal.

Siza donated his archive to the three institutions in 2014, and after three years of archival work, the first batch of entries are set for public viewing.

Videos

Choreographies, an installation at the 4th Lisbon Architecture Triennale by Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, presents the construction of building sites as cultural and political archetypes. By critically contesting comic films and animated cartoons released in the United States and the Soviet Union between 1921 and 1980, it presents construction sites as places in which ideology and imagination were combined through the choreographic movements of hanging steel-beams in the US, and flying concrete-panels in the USSR. These building components symbolize the construction of the modern world, the technological optimism of industrialization, the relevance of the building process over the completed building, and the standing of workers—welders, riveters and crane operators—against the vanishing figure of the architect.