Graçova retrospective - exhibition at Casa da Arquitectura
Today was the last opportunity to visit the exhibition Flashback at the Portuguese Casa da Arquitectura, which maps the more than forty-year professional career of Lisbon architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça.
From a vast array, curator Marta Sequeira ultimately selected ten of Graça's projects covering the period from the early 1980s to the present. This was the most comprehensive exhibition dedicated to this Lisbon architect, who celebrated his seventieth birthday last year. In addition to classic sketches, drawings, and photographs placed on long black tables, the impressive historical hall with an exposed truss was primarily filled with large white paper models that enveloped you and conveyed the structural scheme and spatial composition, allowing you to best understand Graça's working methods and thought processes. All displayed items from Graça's studio are now a permanent part of the collections at Casa da Arquitectura, thereby expanding the extensive archive into which two Pritzker Prize winners, Souto de Moura and Mendes da Rocha, previously donated their lifelong works. The installation of the Flashback exhibition was prepared by the architect himself in collaboration with Inês Lobo.
Graça believes that all artistic fields have the same interests and that each discipline can arrive at similar conclusions through its own means. Therefore, the exhibition presents texts, drawings, models, paintings, sculptures, and films created in different contexts by various authors and artists. Alongside Graça's own drawings and models, the exhibition is complemented by suprematist paintings and plaster architectural models by Kazimir Malevich loaned from the collections of the Paris Centre Pompidou, and proun studies by El Lissitzky borrowed from the Berardo Collection Museum. These works by Russian avant-gardists visibly served as inspiration for his own layout plans or volumetric compositions, which he does not hesitate to acknowledge in the exhibition. However, American minimalists like Donald Judd, James Turrell, or Sol Lewitt are equally inspiring for him. Short videos (sometimes silent and in black and white) by André Cepeda, Catarina Mourão, Tiago Casanova, and Salomé Lamas convey the atmosphere of Graça's buildings into the dimly lit hall. All these films were made specifically for this event.
Today, Graça's minimalist work could be categorized alongside the Lisbon brother duo Aires Mateus and Eduardo Souto de Moura as some of the most interesting on the Portuguese architectural scene, but Graça did not always receive broad understanding. At least at the beginning of the 1980s, during the peak of postmodernism, his proposals linking back to modernism seemed quite unique.
The entire exhibition at Casa da Arquitectura was inaugurated by an event two years ago when Graça's studio moved to new premises in December 2020, but a contract for the transfer of the entire Graça archive into the permanent collections of Casa da Arquitectura was signed as early as February 2020, further enhancing the significance of this institution. Previously, for nearly four decades, Graça occupied two spacious apartments on the Lisbon street Calçada Marquês de Abrantes and always initiated a new project not with a clean table but with a ceremonial clearing of the entire room, which he then gradually filled with paper models and decorated the walls with references, sketches, and drawings.
Just like in Graça's studio, the tables in the exhibition hall are covered with horizontal layers, forming the scenography of the architect's work retrospective. Various artifacts allow visitors to return to the moment when the project was developed and experience the initial moments.
The title of the exhibition relates not only to a comprehensive reflection but also represents connections to future architecture. In addition to showcasing what has already been created, it includes a promise of all that still needs to be done. When visitors reach the end of the exhibition route (capped with a one-hour recording by Austrian filmmaker Ferry Radaxe, Thomas Bernhard - Drei Tage), they must retrace the same path to return to the beginning.
In the ground floor hall of Casa da Arquitectura, the exhibition [From Archive] Unbuilt Matosinhos on eleven unrealized (or partially built) buildings in Matosinhos is still ongoing until early April.
At the end of May, Casa da Arquitectura plans to open two exhibitions dedicated to the Brazilian architect Paulo Archias Mendes da Rocha, who donated his archive to this institution. We can already be sure that it will be one of the largest exhibitions of this Pritzker Prize winner on European soil.
More information >
From a vast array, curator Marta Sequeira ultimately selected ten of Graça's projects covering the period from the early 1980s to the present. This was the most comprehensive exhibition dedicated to this Lisbon architect, who celebrated his seventieth birthday last year. In addition to classic sketches, drawings, and photographs placed on long black tables, the impressive historical hall with an exposed truss was primarily filled with large white paper models that enveloped you and conveyed the structural scheme and spatial composition, allowing you to best understand Graça's working methods and thought processes. All displayed items from Graça's studio are now a permanent part of the collections at Casa da Arquitectura, thereby expanding the extensive archive into which two Pritzker Prize winners, Souto de Moura and Mendes da Rocha, previously donated their lifelong works. The installation of the Flashback exhibition was prepared by the architect himself in collaboration with Inês Lobo.
Graça believes that all artistic fields have the same interests and that each discipline can arrive at similar conclusions through its own means. Therefore, the exhibition presents texts, drawings, models, paintings, sculptures, and films created in different contexts by various authors and artists. Alongside Graça's own drawings and models, the exhibition is complemented by suprematist paintings and plaster architectural models by Kazimir Malevich loaned from the collections of the Paris Centre Pompidou, and proun studies by El Lissitzky borrowed from the Berardo Collection Museum. These works by Russian avant-gardists visibly served as inspiration for his own layout plans or volumetric compositions, which he does not hesitate to acknowledge in the exhibition. However, American minimalists like Donald Judd, James Turrell, or Sol Lewitt are equally inspiring for him. Short videos (sometimes silent and in black and white) by André Cepeda, Catarina Mourão, Tiago Casanova, and Salomé Lamas convey the atmosphere of Graça's buildings into the dimly lit hall. All these films were made specifically for this event.
Today, Graça's minimalist work could be categorized alongside the Lisbon brother duo Aires Mateus and Eduardo Souto de Moura as some of the most interesting on the Portuguese architectural scene, but Graça did not always receive broad understanding. At least at the beginning of the 1980s, during the peak of postmodernism, his proposals linking back to modernism seemed quite unique.
The entire exhibition at Casa da Arquitectura was inaugurated by an event two years ago when Graça's studio moved to new premises in December 2020, but a contract for the transfer of the entire Graça archive into the permanent collections of Casa da Arquitectura was signed as early as February 2020, further enhancing the significance of this institution. Previously, for nearly four decades, Graça occupied two spacious apartments on the Lisbon street Calçada Marquês de Abrantes and always initiated a new project not with a clean table but with a ceremonial clearing of the entire room, which he then gradually filled with paper models and decorated the walls with references, sketches, and drawings.
Just like in Graça's studio, the tables in the exhibition hall are covered with horizontal layers, forming the scenography of the architect's work retrospective. Various artifacts allow visitors to return to the moment when the project was developed and experience the initial moments.
The title of the exhibition relates not only to a comprehensive reflection but also represents connections to future architecture. In addition to showcasing what has already been created, it includes a promise of all that still needs to be done. When visitors reach the end of the exhibition route (capped with a one-hour recording by Austrian filmmaker Ferry Radaxe, Thomas Bernhard - Drei Tage), they must retrace the same path to return to the beginning.
In the ground floor hall of Casa da Arquitectura, the exhibition [From Archive] Unbuilt Matosinhos on eleven unrealized (or partially built) buildings in Matosinhos is still ongoing until early April.
At the end of May, Casa da Arquitectura plans to open two exhibitions dedicated to the Brazilian architect Paulo Archias Mendes da Rocha, who donated his archive to this institution. We can already be sure that it will be one of the largest exhibitions of this Pritzker Prize winner on European soil.
More information >
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