Portugal

Models and drawings are privileged tools for understanding architecture: they display the physical form and expression of buildings. This exhibition brings together a group of models that, after having been exhibited in the past to represent works of architecture, were kept safe by the Centro Cultural de Belém. Like the constructed buildings themselves, whose forms they replicate in miniature, time has passed over them and left its marks. Twenty years since they were originally presented, they are now like treasures that show more than reflections of an era. Transformed into fragments, they offer evidence of the way society, at a certain moment, perceived architecture made in Portugal: sometimes exacerbating or diminishing differences between authors and schools, sometimes scrutinising or acknowledging new authors, sometimes forging the possibility of the existence of a Portuguese architectonic culture with its own specific qualities.

Garagem Sul at Centro Cultural de Belém—the Lisbon gallery dedicated to architecture—opens a Portuguese iteration of At Play on September 28, 2021. Presented initially at CIVA in Brussels, the exhibition is adapted to Garagem Sul and expanded with new works.

In 2021, “Matter. The white conferences”, in partnership with Docomomo Internacional and the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, among other institutions, celebrates the 100th anniversary of Mário Bonito’s birth (1921-1976), a modern architect from Oporto, linked to the inception of the renowned “Porto School of Architecture”, with a strong connection to cinema and active participation in theatre. Through a set of actions, we aim to discuss Mário Bonito’s lines of thought and multidisciplinary body of work, which we would like to expand and deepen through the pursuit of authorial readings on contemporary matters.