The conference Porouscapes: Architectural Strategies for a Resilient Heritage invites contributions from architects and landscape architects, archaeologists, architectural historians and theorists and researchers in general for presentations addressing the problems that architecture and archaeology face today considering porosity as a topic of research.
Concepts allow us to organize the world. Images expand our understanding of the world by transporting a whole field of meanings that allow us to recognize hidden patterns and connect experiences. In the well-known essay by Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis on Naples, from 1925, the concept of porosity provides a poetic image, enriching the understanding of reality through analogy¹. Departing from the yellow tuff upon which the city rests and which uses as building material, the image of the porous stone is the analogical referent for the interpretation of the Napolitan way of life and the architectural and urban space of Naples. “As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything, they preserve the scope to become a theater of new, unforeseen constellations.”² The spatial and physical porosity (“The stairs, never entirely exposed, but still less enclosed … erupt fragmentarily from the buildings …”³) is recognized in the temporal porosity of the life of the inhabitants (“Irresistibly, the festival penetrates each and every working day. Porosity is the inexhaustible law of life in this city, reappearing everywhere.” “Similarly dispersed, porous, and commingled is private life”).
Department of Architecture
Colégio Das Artes UC
For more information on the conference: https://porouscapes.uc.pt
For further information, please contact porouscapes@darq.uc.pt