Casabella Looks at Porto The Magazine’s Interest in a Critical Practice of Architecture

Abstract

The paper intends to analyse how the magazine Casabella interpreted the “phenomenon of a School in Porto” (understood as a field of frequent relations and not as a historicist identification) and to comprehend how themes and projects pertaining to that context were used to orient the cultural debate in Italy. Between Gregotti’s editorship, starting with Évora’s “manifesto”, and the last issue of Dal Co’s editorship dedicated to the designers of the new generation, twenty issues of the magazine published between 1982 and 2017 were selected and studied in order to organise a reflection on the narrative strategy that illustrated the evolution of the collective and simultaneously composite research of different generations of Porto architects. The paper aims to investigate how the Porto experience has oriented the Italian architectural debate of the last forty years by setting up a reasoning on some bridging themes that accumulate the two cultural contexts. Through the analysis of some published projects and the words of protagonists and scholars, arguments for a critical practice of architecture will be isolated and the presence of shared values among the various generations of architects will be verified, despite a great variety of languages and independent research paths that have defined links, discontinuities, common roots and personal autonomies.