Paolo Portoghesi, the master of choral architecture died

He died this morning in his legendary home in Calcata where the architect Paolo Portoghesi had lived for many years. He was 92 years old. Lucid until the last moment of his life he was writing a book on beauty. Many of his projects, with which, since the mid-60s, he anticipated the Postmodern movement, from which he would then, in recent years, detach himself, to explore other ideas and new criteria, such as those of Geo-architecture.

University professor, renowned designer, theorist, Portoghesi was the leading exponent of Postmodernism in Italy. Among his unforgettable works, the mosque in Rome, Casa Papanice, also in the capital, and the Church of the Holy Family in Salerno.

Born in Rome, the son of an engineer, raised in the Pigna district, 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. After graduating in 1957, in 1961 he joined the Socialist Party and was part of the National Assembly during the Craxi secretariat.

He taught the history of criticism collaborating with Bruno Zevi in ​​the creation of the impressive exhibition on Michelangelo the architect. In 1964 he founded a studio together with the engineer Vittorio Gigliotti with whom he will carry out most of the projects of his career. In 1966 he founded the magazine Controspazio of which he will remain director until 1983; he will subsequently direct the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Architecture and Urban Planning (1968) and the magazines Itaca (1977), Eupalino (1985/90), Materia (since 1990) and Abitare la Terra (since 2001).

The Via Novissima
In 1979 he was elected director of the Architecture sector of the Venice Biennale. In the same year he commissioned Aldo Rossi to build the Teatro del Mondo on a vessel moored in the basin of San Marco, which he would then sail to Dubrovnik. In 1980, together with nineteen of the most famous architects in the world (including Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Hans Hollein, Frank Gehry, Ricardo Bofill, Robert Stern, Franco Purini, Oswald Mathias Ungers and Paul Kleihus) he built the Via Novissima, a which, after being transferred to Paris, to the Salpetriére roundabout, will cross the ocean and be reassembled in San Francisco in the United States. From 1983 to 1993 he was president of the Venice Biennale, a mandate concluded with an exhibition on Sacred Space in the three monotheistic religions, inaugurated in Venice in the autumn of 1993 and then transferred to Munich, London and Berlin.

The works
In many years of career with a multifaceted personality and commitments that ranged from historical-critical work to design, from university teaching to institutional offices (in 1979 architecture director of the Venice Biennale of which he was then president from 1983 to 1993), Portoghesi has seen many of his projects realized, designing and building everything in Italy and abroad. The list is long, from the Casa Baldi of 1959 to the mosque in Rome, perhaps his best-known work, passing through the residential complexes of Enel in Tarquinia, the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila, the theater of Catanzaro. His is also the restoration of the square of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, while among the works abroad there are residences (Berlin), gardens (Montpellier), hotels, fast food (Moscow), the mosque in Strasbourg. ‘”Having to choose three that represent me, I would indicate the church of the Holy Family in Salerno (1974), the small church of San Cornelio and Cipriano in Calcata (2009) and the mosque in Rome (1995)”, he explained years ago in a ‘interview. «But that’s not all, because the projects are a bit all children, every now and then I go to visit them».

The park of Villa Calcata
Between 1990 and 2008, he designed the large park of his Villa Calcata, which brings together all the most characteristic forms of his architecture. His studio and personal library are also located here, located in some renovated buildings. Applying Serge Latouche’s theories on degrowth, in recent decades Portoghesi defined the new current of Geoarchitecture, a humanistic architecture inspired by seven fundamental criteria for the present and the future: learning from nature, confronting the place, learning from history, engaging in innovation, draw on the community, protect the natural balance and contribute to the reduction of consumption.

Scholar of Islamic culture
Close to the Arab world and scholar of Islamic culture, in the seventies he designed the Royal Palace of Jordan in Amman, the airport and the master plan of Khartoum and later, the Mosques of Rome (in collaboration with Vittorio Gigliotti and the architect Sami Mousawi) and Strasbourg. In Calcata between 1990 and 2008 he designed the large park of his villa in which all the typical forms of Portoghesi’s architecture converge and which also houses the headquarters of his studio and the vast personal library, located in some renovated buildings.

The cathedral of Lamezia Terme
His latest work is very recent. This is the complex of the new cathedral of Lamezia Terme built in 2019, characterized by a large collective exedra space that connects the church with the town hall according to an ancient European tradition. On it flows the semicircular churchyard between two porticoes, symbols of welcome and openness.