The architect Paolo Portoghesi is dead. The master of Italian postmodernism died on the morning of Tuesday 30 May at his home in Calcata, in the province of Viterbo, at the age of 92. Still very clear-headed, Portoghesi lived a life full of assignments, ideas, aspirations and projects right up to the end (in the last period he was writing a book on beauty). University professor, theoretician and designer of international renown, during his many years of career Portoghesi has seen the realization of many of his projects, designing and building not only in Italy but also abroad: theatres, gardens (Montpellier), hotels, palaces, churches, cemeteries, mosques and even fast food (Moscow). Among his most famous works of architecture (and often the subject of controversy) the Great Mosque of Rome, the Church of the Holy Family of Salerno and the Islamic cultural center in Rome. He also directed the Venice Biennale. His models: Bramante, Borromini, but also Le Corbusier, Terragni, Ridolfi.
In the world of architects, Portoghesi stood out for his bold and inclusive vision by transforming architectural spaces into places of meeting and sharing, uniting the past and the present and embracing historical continuity. But in the last thirty years he has also been one of the main theorists of the "geoarchitecture", a discipline, according to himself, which "seeks to correct the architecture-nature relationship on the basis of a new alliance: man must stop building according to a purely economic logic which produces waste of energy, pollution and exploit the heritage of ancient villages instead of abandoning them to destruction”. A theme on which, especially today, Portoghesi would still have much to say and teach.
Who was Paolo Portoghesi
Born raised in the Pigna district of Rome, in the heart of the Baroque capital, its main source of aesthetic inspiration, Portoghesi enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture in 1950 and, while still a student, published the first monograph on Guarino Guarini and some essays on Francesco Borromini, at the whose work he will devote numerous studies over the years. After graduating in 1957, he enrolled in the 1961 Socialist Party and was part of the National Assembly during the Craxi secretariat. He taught history of criticism (1962-66) at the University of Rome, from 1967 to 1977 he was professor of history of architecture at the Milan Polytechnic, of which he was dean from 1968 to 1976. In 1979 he became director from the Venice Biennale, to then hold the office of president from 1983 to 1993. In 1980 the Biennale featured the installation New road in which about twenty internationally renowned architects are called to design twenty adjoining facades. After being moved to the Salpetriére roundabout in Paris, the installation will cross the ocean and be reassembled in San Francisco in the United States. The event attracted much media attention and became the Italian manifesto of postmodern architecture, of which Portoghesi would remain the main and most famous supporter in Italy throughout the XNUMXs.
The works
Among his works of architecture the following should be mentioned: the Baldi house in Rome (1959), the Andreis house in Scandriglia (1963); Papanìce house in Rome (1967); Industrial Technical Institute in L'Aquila (1968); church of the Holy Family in Salerno (1968); Social center with civic library in Avezzano (1969); Mosque and Islamic Cultural Center in Rome (1976-91); headquarters of the Academy of Fine Arts in L'Aquila (1978); Enel residential complex in Tarquinia (1981); thermal pavilion in Montecatini (1987); Municipal Theater of Catanzaro (1988); thermal buildings in Nocera Umbra (1989); Piazza Leon Battista Alberti in Rimini (1990); Pietralata towers for the Sdo of Rome (1996); church of Santa Maria della Pace in Terni (1997); Renaissance district in the Parco Talenti in Rome (2001); project for the Shanghai tower (2006); project for the renovation of Piazza San Silvestro in Rome (2011); campus of the Oncological Reference Center of Aviano (2016). And, finally, his latest work: the inter-parish complex of the church of San Benedetto in Lamezia Terme (2019).
Exhibitions of his architectural works have been held at the Milan Triennale, the Venice Biennale (1977), the Vienna Bauzentrum, the Hochschule für Bildende Kunste in Hamburg, as well as in Berlin, Karlsruhe, Bielefeld, Göttingen, Osaka, Kassel, Paris , New York, San Francisco, Milan and along via Giulia in Rome.
The publications
Among his Publications more recent ones include: “Roma/amoR. Memory, story, hope” (2019); "Poetry of the curve" (2020); “Poetically inhabiting the earth. The house, the studio and the garden of Calcata” (2022). In the latter book, with the collaboration of his wife Giovanna Massobrio, he tells the 'little world' of Calcata, the village on the tufa cliff where the architect arrived in 1974 for the first time and which he revived with his home.
To his activity as a historian, theorist and critic we owe testi such as: “Guarino Guarini” (1956), “Borromini, architecture as language” (1967); “Rome of the Renaissance” (1970); “Liberty album” (1975); “The angel of history. Theories and languages of architecture” (1982); “Postmodern. Architecture in the post-industrial society” (1982); “The square as a 'place of gazes'” (1990); "The great architects of the twentieth century" (1998); “Architecture and nature” (1999); “Geoarchitecture” (2005).
