Museum hosts Open Classes of the Siza Baroque project

The Baroque as an idea can be better understood through a diptych that confronts two author-architects who were born, one year apart, in the first half of the Baroque century (16th-17th). The rivalry and dispute between the two is historical.

This cycle of two lectures aims to revisit what unites these two adversaries (who respected each other) and whose dispute helped to develop their respective individual architectural expressions and, above all, contributed to the most astonishing critical reconstruction of classical architecture that the Siza Baroque project aims to continue.

Siza Baroque is a research project that aims to highlight the relationship between the idea of Baroque and the work of Álvaro Siza. As a trend in art in general and architecture in particular, the Baroque wants to build a new world on the basis of the old, which it believes is not prepared for the present and the future to come. The links between Álvaro Siza’s architecture and the Baroque are present in various authors who have written about Siza, as well as remaining in the way Siza himself, referring to Porto and Nasoni in written texts, announces his interest and commitment to learning more about Baroque architecture and the city Barrocas.

José Miguel Rodrigues is an architect and full professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, where he teaches the History of Modern Architecture course and, as part of the PhD program, the Thesis Project course [profile E]. He is co-author of the New Village of Luz project (1995-2002). Since 2011 he has been working on a project to translate the written work of Giorgio Grassi into Portuguese. In 2013, he published his doctoral thesis ‘The Ordered and Accessible World of Architectural Forms’ and in 2020 the book ‘Palladio and the Modern’, which was awarded the FAD prize, thought and criticism (2021). He is currently director of the Center for Architecture and Urbanism Studies at the Faculty of Architecture and coordinator of the T2P research group, being the Lead Researcher of the Siza Barroco project.

Joana Couceiro is an architect with a degree from the University of Coimbra (2005) and a PhD from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (2018). She was a collaborator at aNC arquitectos and at the Pedra Líquida studio, and has co-authored published works. She is co-founder of the architecture publishing house Circo de Ideias (she was part of the management team until 2018) and of Pechakucha Night Porto. At the invitation of Casa da Arquitectura, she curated the V Open House Porto, under the title ‘Inner Life’. Between 2013 and 2021, she was a guest lecturer in the History of Modern Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto. Between 2021 and 2023 she was a researcher at esad-idea and assistant curator of the conference program for the second and third editions of the Porto Design Biennale. She is currently a researcher at the Center for Architecture and Urbanism Studies, where she is developing the Siza Barroco project.