The Portuguese school brings with it a long cultural journey that becomes for many architects, an ideal place for experimenting and planning. An example is Mantua, which has been influenced by creating a unique link with Portugal, which through various architectural works resulted in the homonymous province.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DEBATE
Portugal is one of the few nations that has been able to create, in the contemporary architectural field, its own school of thought, a design modus operandi recognized, studied and taken as a reference. The quality of the Lusitanian architects and the design stature of their buildings have placed this territory among the excellence of architectural production, elevating it to a case study and analysis.
What many define “the Portuguese school”, seeing in this definition a sharing of formal codes and a common approach to the project, is the result of a complex research, of a continuous and plural debate, started at the time of the Salazar regime and continued to the present day; a long training course that has always given the house a central role, as evidenced by the revolutionary text “the problem of the Portuguese home”, where Fernando Tàvora dictates the main lines of what will become the “third way”, an architecture that is opposed both to the extreme modernism and to the rhetorical academicism of the regime, and “l’inquerito sobre à arquitectura popular portuguesa”, a territorial research, in which the same Tàvora took part, with the ambition to analyze spontaneous architecture to grasp continuity and archetypes.
Page from the book “O problema da casa portuguesa”
In addition to housing and the popular architectural tradition, to be analyzed and recovered, this long debate and confrontation has had a further pivotal point, as can be seen in the book “the organization of space” of Tàvora: the context, understood as an accumulation of signs and meanings to be updated, an obsessive search for relationships between the architectural solid and the place in which it arises, considering the void itself as an element to be designed like the built volumes.
The result of this long cultural journey is a design mindset that, especially for the attention to the context and for the geometric essentiality, is easily exportable, finding also in the technological revolution in progress, a great ally.
PORTUGAL – MANTUA
Today architecture lives a very different reality compared to the scenarios of a few decades ago and the “liquid” reality has favored the growth of external influences and continuous contaminations, both commercial and artistic-cultural, often creating unusual and unexpected connections and contacts, like the thin red line that connects Portugal to the small, and peripheral, province of Mantua. In this small reality, despite the widespread poor quality of the architectural production and the continuous examples of buildings in perfect “Padania classic” style, some architects were born and grew up and found their ideal design habitat in Portugal, the quality of Portuguese teaching, spreading the language in conferences open to the public and in the academic rooms of the local university.
The Portugal-Mantua link becomes more and more concrete and the signs in the province are increasingly tangible and appreciated, as is the case with the “white house” in Bozzolo, a 220 sq. M. Residential building, concluded in 2010 whose designer, the architect Paola Marini, won the Renzo Piano Foundation award.
House in Bozzolo – Mantua
The construction takes great inspiration from the projects signed by the famous Lisbon architect Aires Mateus, in whose study the designer has worked and learned for several years, the project can therefore be considered as the most important testimony of Portuguese architectural language currently present in Mantua.
The residence, located near the town walls but outside the historic center, looks like a white monolith, a chromatic solution present in many works by Aires Mateus, whose volume is worked by subtraction, the contact between exterior and interior is made possible by ample asymmetric cuts that are determined, vertically, by the windows and, horizontally, by the small hypogeum patios that cut into the ground. The work enhances its scenographic character during the winter periods, when the numerous mists envelop these territories, making the landscapes melancholy and lunar.
Bozzolo’s case-study is not the only tangible sign of the prolific relationship between Mantua and Portugal, this convergence of intentions and aspirations begins to be tangible even among Portuguese studio-ateliers who have been able to obtain important positions in magazines and publications, it is undeniable that among these prominent professionals there is the Correira / Ragazzi studio, formed by Graca Correira, Portuguese with great artistic sensibility and already collaborator of Souto De Moura, and by Robero Ragazzi, from Mantua (Poggio Rusco) formed among the big names of IUAV, including Francesco Venezia and Tafuri, landed in Porto only after completing his academic studies.
THE IMPORTANCE OF TEACHING
If in the built architecture the influence that Portugal exerts on some Mantuan architects begins to be visible, it is in the teaching that this bond is realized and cemented, it is indeed in the formation the area where the great hopes of Mantua are placed, it is in the debate and in the research that these influences find their lifeblood and lay the foundations for an architectural growth so necessary in this province.
The reference point, due to the spread of architectural culture, remains the Milan Polytechnic which has its own headquarters in the city, this campus can boast the presence of very influential teachers, including the 2011 Pritzker Prize Souto De Moura, one of the three Masters historians, with Tavora and Siza, of the Portuguese school.
The Politecnico – Milan
The presence of leading figures, and the consequent desire to transmit their design approach, represents an excellent investment for the future of the city from a design point of view; teaching a constructive and context-oriented design approach, like the one born in Portugal, is the privileged way to have measured projects able to develop the potential of each place.
The Politecnico is not the only institution to have educational and training purposes, the important role played by the university is ideally accompanied by the L.A.C. Contemporary Architecture Laboratory, an important association that has had the capacity to understand the importance and the need to promote debates and conferences related to contemporary architecture in a historic city, with the aim of raising architectural quality; the L.A.C. has the great merit of having forced Mantua to a continuous confrontation with external references of quality, with unusual architectural languages for a reality with a very strong historical heritage.
In the numerous succession of architects who participated in the events organized by the Contemporary Architecture Laboratory, many Portuguese masters have had the opportunity to spread their own school of thought, further strengthening the thin red line that connects Portugal to Mantua.