8TH SOPHIA JOURNAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Landscapes of care: photography, film, modern architecture and landscape heritage invited theoretical and field work where architectural photography and film-making are descriptive, analytical and interpretive, communicating original perceptions and new understandings of modern architecture and landscapes. Photography and film projects that will allow us to show how modern buildings and landscapes have responded to and reflect the local conditions of their production and importance.  Projects which critique and expand our understanding of what constitutes modern architecture and landscape, in terms of its language, locations, functions, creators, patrons and public.

Photography and film work that can allow us to see the social dimension of architecture and landscape, to understand architecture as Alvar Aalto did, “as a great synthetic process of combining thousands of definite human functions” to contribute to a greater understanding of modern architecture’s and landscape’s potential for a more ecological and sustainable balance and interplay between architecture and nature.

The Conference, on the 15th of September, will be presenting the selection of the best theoretical papers and visual essays submitted to our Call. Being organised in 3 panels, it will constitute a live forum for debating photography, film, modern architecture and landscape heritage, among other stimulating issues central to discuss what we have proposed in our Call.

Program and Book of abstracts

• Program

• Book of abstracts

INTEGRATED PROGRAM TO CONFERENCE: Exhibition The Idea of Álvaro Siza by Mark Durden and João Leal

The exhibition shows the photographic work developed around two of Siza´s paradigmatic buildings, which are the Carlos Ramos Pavilion and the Faculty of Architecture of Porto, resulting in the publication of the the first of the three volumes of the collection 'scopionewspaper journal The Idea of Álvaro Siza.

About The Idea of Álvaro Siza

The Idea of Álvaro Siza is a photographic project that has its origins in the work developed by Mark Durden and João Leal in response to Siza's architecture since 2017.

The project involving a selection of architectural buildings designed by Álvaro Siza has been supported from the outset by the research group Architecture, Arte and Image - CEAU | AAI – and has given rise to the editorial | graphic design project scopionewspaper journal The Idea of Álvaro Siza with the seal of scopio Editions, being also supported by the University of South Wales.

The Idea of Álvaro Siza understands architecture as both subject and artistic matter exploring a visual strategy that moves away from traditional mainstream architectural photography. It expands the comprehension of architecture, investigating photography’s ability as a unique form of expression, capable of creating a visual narrative that moves between the real and the poetic. The photography series of this project allow viewers to sense both the magical experience that Siza’s architectural spaces produce for us and how light and nature interplay within those spaces and how Siza’s spatial forms relate with the context, offering a deeper understanding of the architect’s oeuvre.

The project is now expanding to include works by other architects. In 2023, in addition to the publication “Ocean Swimming Pool”, two more will be launched focused on the work of Carlos Scarpa and Aldo Rossi, namely “Brion Memorial” and “Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetry”.

About the curatorial work of the Exhibition The Idea of Álvaro Siza in Pavilion Carlos Ramos

It was sought to explore a site-oriented approach to the exhibition The Idea of Álvaro Siza in the Pavilion Carlos Ramos taking advantage of the building´s unique architectural characteristics in terms of natural light, rich relations between interior and exterior spaces and the white boards of many walls ready to be pinned with students work.

The objective was to communicate and exhibit the work in a more alternative way, as well as related to the project concept itself, withstanding from common strategies and challenge the viewer's relationship to the work exhibited, exploring the “architectural promenade” concept and trying to break any sequential monotony and barriers between the work and the public.

DATE
15th and 16th of September 2023

PLACE

The Conference will be held in person and online at FAUP - Auditorium Fernando Távora - and the Exhibition will be at Carlos Ramos Pavilion.

CONFERENCE LIVE STREAMING YOUTUBE FAUPlive
https://www.youtube.com/@fauplive

VIA ZOOM
Zoom link: https://videoconfcolibri.zoom.us/j/91965794170?pwd=TUZIWUlIdHlWQkxhRE5URU9vTWxZZz09

Meeting ID: 919 6579 4170

Password: 410878

PROGRAM

Opening remarks 
9h30 - 10h00 | Teresa Calix [subdirector of FAUP], Pedro Leão Neto [arquiteto, FAUP]

PANEL #01 | Chair: Hugh Campbell, Teresa Ferreira
10h00 - 10h15 | Presentation 1 | Birgit Schilke Hammer/Leonie Bunte
Changing the Image: Photographic Investigations on the Anonymous Modern, West Germany 1970-1989

10h15 - 10h30 | Presentation 2: Giulio Galasso / Natalia Voroshilova (Visual Essays)
Oases in the grid: The gardens of postwar Milanese middle-class housing

10h30 - 11h00 | Interval

11h00 - 11h15 | Presentation 3: Jasna Galjer
Ways of seeing architecture and landscape in the voids of presence. The case of a health resort on the Adriatic coast of Croatia

11h15 - 11h30 | Presentation 4: Julia Maria Bezerra de Mello
Other Interpretations on Tower H

11h30 - 12h00 | Roundtable discussion

PANEL #02 | Chair: Igea Troiani, Mark Durden
12h15 - 12h30 | Presentation 5: Richard Williams
São Paulo's Minhocão on Film

12h30 - 12h45 | Presentation 6: Sotiria Alexiadou / Vassilis Colonas
Unclaiming the natural waterfront landscape: Thessaloniki's manmade east waterfront

12h45 - 13h00 Presentation 7: Lars Rolfsted Mortensen  [Visual Essays]
The Infrastructural Sublime Marvel, apprehension, and environmental awareness in the encounter of dams

13h00- 14h00 | Lunch Break

14h00 - 14h15 | Presentation 8: Joao Gadelho Novais Tavares
Foz Velha. The creation of an image of permanencies and transformations

14h15 - 14h45 Roundtable discussion

PANEL #03| Chair: João Leal, Rikke Munck Petersen
14h45 - 15h00 | Presentation 9: Ciro Miguel
Ektachrome Color: White buildings, Red Dust

15h15 - 15h30 | Presentation 10: Corné Strootman
Filmmaking as a tool for landscape architecture: Analysing and mediating the spatial impact of agricultural techniques

15h30 - 16h00 | Interval

16h15 - 16h30 | Presentation 11: Millicent Gunner  [Visual Essays]
Walking the Table : Caring-with landscape

16h30 - 16h45 | Presentation 12: Tonia Carless [Visual Essays]
Unsettling in Norrlands

16h45 - 17h15 | Roundtable discussion

17h30 - 19h00 | Pavilhão Carlos Ramos | Opening and visit to the Exhibition 'The Idea of Álvaro Siza'
Port Wine reception | Ocean Swimming Pool Launch - scopionewspaper journal collection

16 th SEPTEMBER
Open Call | Sophia Journal Landscapes of Care Vol. 9
10h00 - 10h20 | Maria Neto

Panel #4 | Documentary artistic publications about architecture
Chair / moderator - Olívia Marques da Silva

10h20 - 10h50 | Invited speaker - Nuno Grande
Presentation of the book 'Another Approach on the Works of Álvaro Siza'

10h50 - 11h20 | Moderator - Olívia Marques da Silva
Presentation of the scopionewspaper collection 'The Idea of Álvaro Siza'

11h20 - 11h30 | Interval

11h30 - 13h30 | Chair / moderator - Olívia Marques da Silva
Opening the discussion focused on documentary artistic publications about architecture
Invited speakers - Nuno Grande, Paulo Catrica, Rita Castro Neves
Authors: João Leal, Mark Durden and Pedro Leão Neto

Documentary artistic publications about architecture: presentation and discussion of the book “Another Approach on the Works of Álvaro Siza” and scopionewspaper collection “The Idea of Álvaro Siza”

The book “Another Approach on the Works of Álvaro Siza” is based on the research work that has been developed at FAUP since 2015 around Contemporary Documentary Photography on Portuguese Architecture, namely the research work developed by Pedro Leão Neto author for the purpose of the Post-Doctorate at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, "Mapping Documentary and Artistic Photography: A Contemporary Look at Architecture and Reference Spaces in Porto (MFDA-ARP)" (2018). Pedro Leão Neto was scientifically supervised by Jorge Figueira, Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, University of Coimbra, between 2010 and 2017 and guest Professor at the PhD Programme in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, who was the supervisor of the research work, together with José Maçãs de Carvalho, Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Coimbra and at the Colégio das Artes. The re-edition of the book helps to consolidate the research, as well as ensuring the continuity of this study and analysis, namely the particular study on the different perceptions and representations of a set of architectural buildings designed by the architect Álvaro Siza that are photographed by different photographers.

ABSTRACTS OF THEORETICAL PAPERS AND VISUAL ESSAYS

Panel #1 | Types
Changing the Image: Photographic Investigations on the Anonymous Modern, West Germany 1970-1989
Birgit Schillak-Hammers / Leonie Bunte

The appreciation of the aesthetics of a certain era often becomes very important when it comes to preserving architecture. Not only is this problematic by itself but also because the prevailing taste is subject to constant change. While the architecture of the 1920s and 1930s is currently being celebrated for its stylistic coherence, the same cannot be claimed for post-World War II buildings. In 1954, the term “brutalism” was coined in Britain regarding the “beton brut” used for the mass production of large housing developments in urban suburbs as well as for sculptural buildings with extreme cantilevers and carved ornaments. Despite its controversial appearance, brutalism is nevertheless a renowned architectural style. Moreover, it is recently experiencing a renaissance, photography was jointly responsible for.
In the 1970s and 1980s anonymous architecture grew in European cities. These buildings evoke an idea of ugliness that is not the same as brutalism. The “ugly” becomes apparent in materials and forms that are diverse from one another but indeterminable anonymous and somehow beautiful in their ugliness. Today, their architectural qualities are easily overlooked and highly underestimated. They are often considered as disruptive elements in the city landscape, disregarded by the authorities, scholars and not least the mass media. This kind of underestimation by architectural history as well as the general public puts the anonymous modern in danger of not being preserved. The reasons why this heritage at risk is getting demolished are manifold. Apart from problems of usability caused for instance by toxins or technical obsolescence, the general appreciation of the architectural style often turns out to be the decisive factor. Thus, the preservation of these “ugly” buildings claims a necessary approach to architectural aesthetics and innovative “interpretative tools”.
This leads to the question how the image of this kind of anonymous modern architecture can be improved to rescue these buildings from demolition. First research approaches to this topic took place in context of the “Zukunft Bau—Pop-up Campus 2022” sponsored by the German Federal Institute for Research on Building. Corresponding to the given motto “Save Material - Save the planet”, the authors hosted a workshop for students of architecture in which they pictured a wide range of buildings from the 1970s and 1980s in Aachen, an average West-German post-war-city, that were subjects of recent discussions in urban planning and in danger to be teared down. The results of the photographic studies were shown in an exhibition and published in a catalogue. This research project introduced a broader theoretical question that takes the discussion further than the local context it originated in: Can photography affect the preservation dynamics of controversial and underestimated buildings? Regarding the first outcomes it seems reasonable. Thus, this paper is about continuing the studies and strengthen the arguments using the example of characteristic West German city landscapes in the 1970s and 1980s following the tracks of previous attempts. The argument deploys specific criteria concerning professional and amateur photography, applied to the circumstances of forgotten built legacies.

Oases in the grid: The gardens of postwar Milanese middle-class housing
Giulio Galasso / Natalia Voroshilova (Visual Essays)

This essay examines the landscape of Milanese street-front gardens of post-WWII middle-class housing. Spread around the city by hectic developers, these gardens reflect specific cultural, political and social conditions of Italy’s industrial capital during the economic miracle. Street-facing gardens are an essential feature of modern middle-class condominiums. They reflected the modernist urban vision of a park-city and the Milanese tradition of the street facade; they bore the bourgeois culture with its urge for representative decorum and the freedom of architectural experimentation; their image was used as a marketing tool in real estate advertisement but also as an argument in negotiation for the building licence.In Post-WWII Milan urban nature radically changed its connotation: from a hygienic device, it transformed into a status symbol, and the Milanese started to take care of gardens precisely because of their decorative importance. Even though they are private, they are designed to be looked at from the street, and therefore they make an important part of the everyday urban experience. Beyond their speculative nature, the gardens of Milanese condominiums transformed the urban landscape, bringing density together with well-cared nature into the city streets. This phenomenon is explored through a series of distant and close-up views as if following a wandering gaze through the streets of the city.

Ways of seeing architecture and landscape in the voids of presence. The case of a health resort on the Adriatic coast of Croatia
Jasna Galjer

The article examines the multilayered roles of photography and film in “cultural translation”, representing architecture and landscape as a mediated place of conflicting visions, meanings and experiences. Taking the concept of the “production of space” as a starting point, it aims to contextualise the mediatory practices of photography and film by means of analysing the case study of a multifunctional building – the Krvavica Children’s Health Resort – designed in the 1960s by Rikard Marasović on the Adriatic coast of Croatia (formerly Yugoslavia). Focusing on an analysis of three paradigmatic examples of visual practices, the photographic series by Wolfgang Thaler (2011), the episode Mysterious Object in the Pine Forest filmed as part of the documentary series Slumbering Concrete (2016), and the experimental film A Record of Landscape without Prehistory by the artistic duo Doplgenger (2020), the article explores how photography and film communicate quality, in particular how mediated representations (re)create current interpretation and understanding of the intertwined heritage of modern architecture and landscape. Examining aspects of recording the site from different perspectives, a series of questions arise when addressing the issue of space, focused on its role in reshaping meanings, memories, emotions and experiences, narrating not only what architecture and landscape are but also what they could become and how they might be constituted in the context of different cultural identities.

Other Interpretations on Tower H
Julia Maria Bezerra de Mello

The essay Other Interpretations on Tower H is the result of a keen interest in exploring the multiple interpretative possibilities concerning a specific abandoned residential building in Rio’s Barra da Tijuca district. Tower H was part of Architect Oscar Niemeyer's ‘Centro da Barra’ project (1969), developed in this up-and-coming neighborhood at that time. The research for this text began in 2021, while the tower was under structural inspection.  As a result of it, I identified ‘ambiguous’ and ‘open’ aspects of the building that relate to Ignasi de Solà-Morales’ terrain vague concept.  The recent demolition of the tower’s sealing surface and the subsequent excavation of a landfilled area next to the tower have changed the city’s perception and memory fluxes of the building: from the past to the present; from closed to exposed interiors; from covered to excavated landfilled sand that was buried since the tower construction.  All of this brings back memories of the neighborhood’s landscape not only during the presence of this imposing building but also prior to its existence.  A photographic experiment promoted a tactical experience inside this enigmatic architectural object. Additionally, it analyzed displacement operations from the last two years, allowing new interpretations on this landmark.

Panel #2 | Places
São Paulo's Minhocão on Film
Richard Williams

This paper concerns the cinematic representation on film of São Paulo’s Elevado João Goulart, a 3.5km elevated expressway close to the historic centre of the city, popularly known as the Minhocão. Built during the boom period of Brazil’s dictatorship, the Minhocão opened to traffic in January 1971. Controversial at the beginning of its existence, it has been partially rehabilitated, a process in which film has been important. The paper discusses a number of the Minhocão’s appearances in mainstream cinema, including Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), and Terra Estrangeira (Walter Salles, 1995). In most of these films, the Minhocão is a generalised presence, representing global fears about the modern city. This paper moves on to consider documentary approaches to the Minhocão, including the prizewinning Elevado 3.5 (2006). The paper argues that through this and other documentaries the Minhocão is rendered as a specific lived place. The paper concludes by locating the cinematic history of the Minhocão in a broader history of the representation of infrastructure.  

Unclaiming the natural waterfront landscape: Thessaloniki's manmade east waterfront
Vassilis Colonas / Sotiria Alexiadou

This article focuses on the transition of the natural landscape of the city’s waterfront to the artificial urban landscape that draws a straight line between water and land. The manmade east waterfront of Thessaloniki was a result of the Cold War era’s geopolitical strategies that proposed a major backfill project creating a  vast and “straight” new land during the 1960s and early 1970s. Until then the natural waterfront, of small bays and small peninsulas, was the city’s recreation area, framed by architectural masterpieces -notable citizens’ mansions (late 19th-early 20th century)- , whose gardens were reaching the water. After the landfill, the old mansions would gradually be abandoned and replaced by apartment buildings, as stipulated in the area's new masterplan, forming a rather rigid homogenous image of the city in contrast to the former porosity and architectural variety of the mansions.
Cinematographers included the change of Thessaloniki’s waterfront in their films, either as a commentary on the new landscape or as a memoir of a lost era. Cinematographers, such as Takis Kanellopoulos in his film “Parenthesis” (1968), tried to convey how the modern landscape reforms relationships and used that vast empty space as an allegory. On another approach, thirty years later (1998) Theo Angelopoulos in his film “Eternity and a Day” in a poetic mood recreated the previous landscape of the natural waterfront to highlight the complete interruption and conclusion of the former era, while highlighting through foggy weather the obscurity that the current program of the open accessed waterfront promenade offers.

The Infrastructural Sublime Marvel, apprehension, and environmental awareness in the encounter of dams
Lars Rolfsted Mortensen (Visual Essay)

Dams in the Swiss Alps are at once engineering marvels, dramatic man-made artefacts, crucial nodes in far-reaching infrastructural systems, and destructive interventions in alpine ecosystems. The essay explores the contradictory nature of dams in the Swiss Alps through the author’s photographs and the experience of the sublime. By focusing on the coming together of rockface and cast concrete shell within the images, the dams appear as distinct naturecultures interwoven with the flows and forces of the alpine landscape. Using the sublime as the lens to describe the aesthetic experience, the essay proposes the possibility of gaining environmental awareness and humility of the vast impact of dams, through the encounter of the infrastructural sublime.

Foz Velha: The creation of an image of permanencies and transformations
João Gadelho Novais Tavares

The present proposal uses the television documentary Foz Velha (1975)[1], from the series As Pedras e o Homem (1973-1976), produced by RTP (Rádiotelevisão Portuguesa[2]), as a means to understand the image that is linked to the territory of Foz Velha, in Foz do Douro (Porto). Aware of RTP's will to promote culture and its ability to condition the viewer's perception of a certain theme, object or space, we intend to analyse this phenomenon at Foz Velha in the aforementioned documentary, for which contribute the script, the selected shots and the chosen soundtrack. This intermediality helps determining the sensorial and affective experience of the space. It is noteworthy that the study of this urban area has been focused on the architectural and urbanistic characterization that occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, associated with the character of villeggiatura inherent to Foz, lacking a holistic view of the transformations that occurred from the second half of the twentieth century and the perception that is being linked to it. In this sense, the documentary will be analysed through the identification of the places filmed and the survey of associated architectural, urban and social characteristics, as these are pointed out both visually and discursively throughout the documentary, as well as considerations, which are made regarding what is considered to be authentic as opposed to contemporary practices. It will be also characterised the existing heterogeneity of Foz Velha, through the examination of existing typologies, the materials used and the ornamental elements of the façades, as well as the size of the plots and urban transformations, displayed at different moments in the documentary. In this way, relationships can be established with the different moments of paradigm change in Foz. With the association of Foz Velha to the idea of an old town, marked by a devout community, with strong links to fishing practices, living a simple and serene domestic life, the documentary makes it possible to trace the profile of the area under study in the 1970s-80s, a period marked by radical urban change, understanding the buildings existing at the time and identifying typologies, materials and elements used. Through comparison with the present day, it is also possible to assess subsequent constructions and interventions in the buildings.

[1] Foz Velha. Directed by José Caria. RTP, 1975. Available on Arquivos RTP. <arquivos.rtp.pt/conteudos/foz-velha/>.

[2] It is the Portuguese public television broadcasting.

Panel #3 | Processes
Ektachrome Color: White buildings, Red Dust
Ciro Miguel

Brasília’s red dust is everywhere. Regularly tinting the white surfaces of Brasília’s modernist buildings red, a great effort of human labor is required every day to maintain their intended autonomy.
Dust clouds first appeared in February 1957 due to massive earthworks and the clearing of the original landscape. While large tractors and caterpillars aggressively manipulated the ground following the forms of Lucio Costa’s Pilot Plan, a formless entropic dispersal of red soil microparticles filled the air.
As the floating dust spread over Brasília’s construction site, it also filled the printed pages of newspapers and magazines. For critics against the capital transfer, the dust was appropriated as a vessel for their anxieties, described as a threat to health and maintenance, “violent clouds of dust … cause coughing and don’t allow anything to stay clean for more than a minute.” For supporters, the dust was “fundamental” and represented progress, the effect of man's fight to domesticate the landscape.
This article intends to discuss how dust tainted the representation of Brasília. As modernist architecture confronted the landscape, dust introduced a distortion in the pure image of Brasília, threatening not only the whiteness of the upcoming architectures but also contaminating drawings, cameras, lenses, printed photographs, clothes and lungs. While most of the architectural black and white photos of Brasília tended to produce clean images, the introduction of the newest color film Ektachrome by photojournalists made earthworks and dust visible. Associated with grainy reproduction in illustrated magazines and speckles of dust in the negatives themselves, the images enhanced the perception of Brasília’s total environmental design.
If dust is, according to Richard Meyer, “an environment in miniature, a physical archive of our material surroundings,” I will analyze how these fine particles of solid matter and their representations in illustrated magazines introduced visual dissonances to architectural modernism and were fundamental to the narrative construct of Brasília as a modernist city in an inhospitable “desert.”

Filmmaking as a tool for landscape architecture: Analysing and mediating the spatial impact of agricultural techniques
Corné Strootman

Current human practices of food production are the largest cause of climate change. The discussion on sustainable development of agriculture has been long-going and polarised. The debate mostly focuses on agricultural techniques in the abstract. However, a radical change in food production techniques will have a substantial spatial impact on agricultural landscapes. In this essay I argue that the current discourse on sustainable agriculture needs to introduce considerations of the aesthetic and systemic consequences of the implementation of agricultural techniques on specific landscapes. Filmmaking, and specifically ‘Landscape film’, can be used to present readings of landscapes where innovative agricultural practices take place. Examining these pioneering landscapes of food production using film gives spatial designers a glimpse of the aesthetic impact of a future where these agricultural techniques are applied more broadly. 
Using my latest film project ‘Tussen de Kassen’, I illustrate three ways in which filmmaking can benefit the work of landscape architects whilst considering the spatial consequences of the transition to sustainable agricultural landscapes. 
As a tool to explore and examine the atmospheres of agricultural landscapes (1) Film is able to convey synaesthetic properties of a space. These are qualities that belong to multiple sensory fields at once. The interaction between the internal world of a viewer and the synaesthetic properties of a landscape generate ‘atmosphere’, the meaning a person assigns unconsciously and almost instantaneously when entering a space. Film allows a viewer to explore the synaesthetic properties behind their initial reaction to a landscape and alter subconsciously assigned meaning.
As an ‘ecological’ methodology to explore the interrelations between agricultural landscapes and agricultural techniques (2) The (architectural) medium used to analyse a site determines the understanding of that site. Filmmaking demands close engagement with a site, making the filmmaker a participant of the landscape. This results in unexpected discoveries of entanglements between agricultural techniques and other site aspects and leads to an ‘ecological’ understanding of a landscape.
As a form of eidetic storytelling to mediate multivalent and non-linear images of anthropocenic landscapes (3) Narrating the functioning and conception of anthropocenic landscapes in a causal, linear manner is problematic as it often leads to ‘undecidability’ and inaction. Eidetic images can mediate alternative landscape narratives by presenting a combination of different types of information (i.e. visual, acoustic, quantifiable, metaphoric, etc.). Film, as an eidetic image, can mediate multivalent, open-ended and non-linear narratives for Anthropocenic landscapes. 

Walking the Table : Caring-with landscape
Millicent Gunner (Visual Essay)

Walking the Table is an experimental project that develops a relationship of care, registering and becoming conscious of subtle changes within an Australian landscape. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s ideas of ‘making-with’ (Haraway 2016, 5) and Tim Ingold’s concept of ‘thinking through making’ (Ingold 2013, 21), this visual essay explores ideas of relational care within a rapidly altering landscape and how one may become an attentive participant, moving with a changing landscape as a practice of care. Understanding ‘landscape’ to be a layered entanglement of systems, materials and inhabitants (non-human and human) movements and projections that are influenced by the past and present, the role of the text is to weave three different layers of conversation that are relational and form an overall narrative.  Photography is used to capture the process of a dialogue emerging between the walker and the landscape, facilitated through the camera and the table when walking the table around the site. Landscape and care is an ever-evolving relationship that requires attentiveness and participation. When a relationship with a landscape is built over a prolonged period of time, revealed are the drastic difference in scales of temporal shifts that landscapes undergo, formulating an ongoing dialogue between the landscape and the inhabitant of that landscape.

Unsettling in Norrlands
Tonia Carless (Visual Essay)

This research uses film, photography and projection to develop analysis of the changing space and architectures of Northern Sweden (Norrlands) as one of the most rapidly reconfiguring spaces in Europe, with on-going programmes of corporate and state investment to exploit space and natural resources for settlement and extraction. The images and films are part of an archive of the wholesale moving of buildings, a common practice in the region. Buildings are moved in relation to changing environmental conditions and now urban land values and global property speculation. The project recognises the potential for an architecture of de-growth[1] to challenge ideas of expanding urbanisation of Norrlands. The unsettling images consider the wrenching of a house from its location and moving it to another location, documenting this process of detachment. Images are collaged onto its original location, in addition to its multiple re positions along the route of its displacement. Images have been constructed through collage and assemblage to further analyse the space between land and building. The displacement of the building is bought to light through image projections to unsettle, make uncertain, be less fixed through material and by superimposing architectures onto a previous state.

[1] Andre Gorz, 1987, p63

Integrated Program to Conference: Exhibition The Idea of Álvaro Siza by Mark Durden and João Leal

The exhibition shows the photographic work developed around two of Siza´s paradigmatic buildings, which are the Carlos Ramos Pavilion and the Faculty of Architecture of Porto, resulting in the publication of the first of the three volumes of the collection scopionewspaper journal The Idea of Álvaro Siza.

About The Idea of Álvaro Siza

The Idea of Álvaro Siza is a photographic project that has its origins in the work developed by Mark Durden and João Leal in response to Siza’s architecture since 2017.

The project involving a selection of architectural buildings designed by Álvaro Siza has been supported from the outset by the research group Architecture, Art and Image - CEAU | AAI – and has given rise to the editorial | graphic design project scopionewspaper journal The Idea of Álvaro Siza with the seal of scopio Editions, also supported by the University of South Wales.

The Idea of Álvaro Siza understands architecture as both subject and artistic matter exploring a visual strategy that moves away from traditional mainstream architectural photography. It expands the comprehension of architecture, investigating photography’s ability as a unique form of expression, capable of creating a visual narrative that moves between the real and the poetic. The photography series of this project allows viewers to sense both the magical experience that Siza’s architectural spaces produce for us and how light and nature interplay within those spaces and how Siza’s spatial forms relate to the context, offering a deeper understanding of the architect’s oeuvre.

The project is now expanding to include works by other architects. In 2023, in addition to the publication “Ocean Swimming Pool”, two more will be launched focused on the work of Carlos Scarpa and Aldo Rossi, namely “Brion Memorial” and “Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetry”.

Open Call | Landscapes of Care. Public housing across multiple geographies: crossing theories and practices

Editors

Maria Neto (UBI-FAUP)
Paz Nuñez Martí (UAH-ETSAM)

Guest Editors
Joan Mac Donald (U. Chile)

Sophia Journal is currently accepting submissions for its third thematic cycle “Landscapes of Care. Public housing across multiple geographies: crossing theories and practices”

Abstract deadline: 1 of December 2023

Selected authors will be notified by the 11 of January 2024

1st Manuscript deadline: 11 of March 2024

2st Manuscript deadline: 1 of September 2024

Deadline for Conference Presentation: 10 of September 2024

International Conference (dtbc): 15 and 16 of September 2024

3rd Manuscript deadline (Journal): 5 of October 2024

Publication date (tbc): by December 2024

Abou “Landscapes of Care. Public housing across multiple geographies: crossing theories and practices”

 Sophia Journal is currently accepting submissions for its third thematic cycle, “Landscapes of Care,” addressing research, projects, experiences, and contemporary photographic and visual practices that focus on how architecture, understood in a broad sense, can help to heal the relationships between man and habitat, as well as the socio-environmental crisis that the planet is experiencing.

The concept of “Landscapes of Care” has increasingly been adopted by diverse areas of study, from health geography to the arts and architecture, transposed here as the action of the social state in the housing sector, which generates a relationship of care between the state and society, framed by economic, social, and cultural rights. In this call, we are interested in investigations and visual narratives that help us understand and document practices outside the dominant narratives, which promote the right to housing but also the right to the city, calling on the city and the territory as living and inclusive organisms, recognizing the importance of public resources and social responses, participatory processes, and co- responsibility, for global sustainability.

This issue, focusing on public housing, allows contributions to be centered on a dynamic reading of the city that is conditional and conditioned by housing typology. Combining architecture, public housing, habitat, and urban planning, we are convoking works that explore an interpretative narrative about housing and those who live in it, pilot projects with communities of practice capable of generating strategic visions about the possible future of city and territory, housing and the lives it (trans)forms, in this ontological relationship between the Man and house.

Public housing should be an example of innovative practices, whether in design or urban and territorial development. However, most interventions carried out through housing policies or specific and isolated actions on public housing are not sufficiently known and disseminated by authorities or, technicians and researchers, failing to produce broad knowledge and debate. Our objective is to make known these practices that intertwine theory and action and explore how photography, surveys, testimonies, and documentaries can be used as significant research instruments in the socio-economic, political, historical, technical, and ecological dimensions of social housing, the city and the territory, revealing good practices and models to study. Launching a critical look at city-making from its dominant program - housing - we also intend to establish relationships of continuity and/or rupture, alignments, and/or gaps between housing and urban, socio-political, and architectural thought nationally and internationally.

In this call for articles and visual essays for this issue of Sophia Journal Vol. 9 | Landscapes of Care. Social housing across multiple geographies: Crossing theories and practices, we invite authors to submit theoretical work, records of experiences in social housing programs, and visual essays on initiatives or pilot programs in public housing, where photography, graphic recording, testimony, and the documentary are present in a significant way and allow adding a differentiating layer for its understanding and recording. Descriptive, analytical, and interpretative projects offer a unique perception and new knowledge about housing, its residents, and the city, and its ability to respond to and reflect local conditions and be an element of socio-territorial cohesion. Projects that are critical territories capable of expanding our understanding of architecture and social landscape in terms of their language, location, residents, and neighborhood.

We are also interested in photography and film work that allows us to acknowledge the social and political dimension of architecture and landscape and understand architecture as Alvar Aalto did, “as a great synthetic process of combining thousands of definite human functions,” together with Donna Haraway’s focus on human and non-human interaction - new “nature cultures” capable of contributing to a greater understanding of the potential of architecture and landscape for a more ecological and sustainable balance and interaction between architecture and nature.

Panel #4 - Documentary artistic publications about architecture

Moderated by Olívia Marques da Silva

Documentary artistic publications about architecture: presentation and discussion of the book “Another Approach on the Works of Álvaro Siza”

The book “Another Approach on the Works of Álvaro Siza” is based on the research work that has been developed at FAUP since 2015 around Contemporary Documentary Photography on Portuguese Architecture, namely the research work developed by Pedro Leão Neto author for the purpose of the Post-Doctorate at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, “Mapping Documentary and Artistic Photography: A Contemporary Look at Architecture and Reference Spaces in Porto (MFDA-ARP)” (2018). Pedro Leão Neto was scientifically supervised by Jorge Figueira, Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, University of Coimbra, between 2010 and 2017 and guest Professor at the PhD Programme in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, who was the supervisor of the research work, together with José Maçãs de Carvalho, Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Coimbra and at the Colégio das Artes. The re-edition of the book helps to consolidate the research, as well as ensuring the continuity of this study and analysis, namely the particular study on the different perceptions and representations of a set of architectural buildings designed by the architect Álvaro Siza that are photographed by different photographers.

Presentation of the scopionewspaper collection “The Idea of Álvaro Siza”

“The Idea of Álvaro Siza” is a Contemporary Photography project that understands architecture as both subject and artistic matter exploring a visual strategy that moves away from traditional mainstream architectural photography. Mark Durden and João Leal in this series aim to expand the comprehension of architecture by investigating photography’s ability as a unique form of expression capable of creating an architectural promenade that moves between a documentary and poetical depiction. This project focused on the architecture of Álvaro Siza has been supported from the outset by the research group Architecture, Arte and Image - CEAU | AAI – and has given rise to the editorial | graphic design project scopio Newspaper “The Idea of Álvaro Siza” with the seal of scopio Editions.

“The Idea of Álvaro Siza” seeks to expand the comprehension of architecture by investigating photography’s capacity as a relevant critical and documentary research tool able to create an architectural promenade in which the images move between documentary and poetical modes. It is a significant example of the immense potential of contemporary photography that takes architecture as its study and artistic object because it is an authorial photography that through poetics and different visual strategies allows us to understand and communicate in a distinguished way the identity of places and how architecture relates to and is part of these places, expanding our knowledge about the thought and imagination of the architect. The project wants hence to contribute to a better understanding of the work of Siza, namely the relationship of his architectural work with both modernism and the specific demands of the territory of its implementation, as well as his unique contributions to the history of architecture. Through their series the viewer is able to sense the magical experience that Siza´s architectural spaces bring upon us and also how light and nature interplay within those spaces. Furthermore, their photographs reveal how Siza´s spatial forms relate with the context, understanding well the architect´s oeuvre.
“The Idea of Álvaro Siza” has given rise to three publications: “Carlos Ramos Pavilion and Bouça Social Housing”, with a text written by Nuno Grande, “Serralves´ Museum”, with a text written by António Choupina and “Ocean Swimming Pool of Leça da Palmeira”, with a text written by Teresa Ferreira, which we launch in this opening of the Exhibition “The Idea of Álvaro Siza”.

In this series “Ocean Swimming Pool of Leça da Palmeira” Durden and Leal prove, besides other things, how photography can capture Siza´s pools over time rather than in a moment, revealing how they age well, making us understand how the materials were thought to ensure the essentiality of the work. They are, as the architect tells us, exposed and left to the weather and “every year, in the high tides, the sea takes what is not essential”1.

 1 Siza Vieira, Álvaro; Textos 01, Porto: Civilização, 2009.

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