PTEN
Trienal de 
The exhibition looks at the way residents of housing designed by Álvaro Siza experience, and interact with, their apartments’ spatial layout, the buildings’ public spaces and housing micro-technologies as well as their buildings’ social status as tourist attractions in their everyday life. Curated by Eduardo Ascensão and Paulo Catrica, the exhibition aims to cover the research gap on Siza’s architecture related to the lack of knowledge on residents’ reception and appropriation of his architecture. The experience of architecture is understood here in the sense of the way residents and the material or technological elements of housing co-constitute intricate processes of adaptation and interaction, making the event of ‘home’.
This relationship will be studied across the social and wealth spectrum, from the low-income population for whom the Bouça estate in Porto was originally designed, to the low-to-middle income population of Malagueira in Évora, through to the very high-income population of Terraços de Bragança in Lisbon. The investigation looks at Siza’s ideas of designing for an ‘inter-classist’ city in concrete sites, fleshing out the under-researched process of a lived architecture. It will use an ethnographic approach, with in-depth interviews, ethnographic ‘house visits’ and elicitation of ‘residents in action with his/her home’ through video and photography sessions. This interdisciplinary nature is reflected in the team members’ disciplinary backgrounds, which bridge Geography and Anthropology to Architecture and Photography.
The exhibition is open until 2 November 2024 (Tuesday to Saturday, 12h00 - 18h30).
Presentation (17h - 18h) with:
Eduardo Ascensão (CEG-IGOT, ULISBOA)
Ricardo Agarez (ISCTE-IUL)
Loretta Lees (Boston University, via online)
Doing words with things (18h - 19h):
The politics and poetics of Elemental’s social housing schemes
Keynote speaker: Ignacio Farías (Humboldt University)