The fortune of the city is that it has never been perfect

How can a city transform without destroying what exists? How can acknowledging time and history positively influence neighbourhood planning? How do 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.

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, Nuno Cera, 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.
 

Raffaele Leone, photograph of Álvaro Siza visiting the project for a housing complex in Campo di Marte in Giudecca, Italy, October 1995. ARCH290882, Alvaro Siza Fonds, CCA. Gift of Álvaro Siza