The Fortune of the City is that it has never been Perfect

How can a city transform without destroying what exists? How could taking time and respecting history positively influence neighbourhood planning? How can citizens participate in this process? And how do architecture and urban planning support each other in designing a harmonious city across various scales, rather than just a series of buildings inserted one after the other? These and more questions continue to be central to city building. While many think digital solutions and data points—like “smart cities”—are the answer to such issues, the city itself provides a rich site for continued exploration: its existing physical, historical, and social fabrics, topographic setting, textures, and faces.

Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza has always worked in building places, neighbourhoods, and cities. The fortune of the city is that it has never been perfect explores his urban projects through his experiential way of understanding a place, its shape, its embodied history, and its life. In considering these aspects across his projects, Siza seeks to determine the right scale of intervening and building within existing frameworks, rather than only designing single buildings.

The exhibition features material from Siza’s archive donated to the CCA, including drawings, photo collages, models, and his sketchbooks alongside photographs by Gabriele Basilico, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Alessandra Chemollo, and Balthazar Korab, as well as work by other architects and historians who were in dialogue with Siza or who worked on the same sites, such as Aldo Rossi, Gene Summers, James Stirling, Kenneth Frampton, and Jean-Louis Cohen. A book will accompany the exhibition, centred around an oral history conducted with Siza over many days in Porto, and bringing together extensive archival documentation along with new notes discovered in his archive and transcribed thanks to a crowdsourcing project.