Docomomo Portugal is pleased to share the call for presentations for the conference Porouscapes: Architectural Strategies for a Resilient Heritage, organized by the Department of Architecture of the University of Coimbra, which is open until 1 September 2026.
The conference will take place at the University of Coimbra on 20-21 November 2026.
The conference Porouscapes: Architectural Strategies for a Resilient Heritage invites architects, landscape architects, archaeologists, historians, and architectural theorists, as well as researchers in general, to submit papers addressing the challenges currently facing architecture and archaeology, with porosity as the theme of their 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”).
The images provided by the concept of porosity are particularly appropriate to think of the complex problems that climate changes pose to the ways in which we design and think of architecture, the city and the territory. Bring to mind resilient exchanges between materials and spaces, the physical spongeous images associated with porosity, allow us to face such problems from a comprehensive architectural point of view, rather than from a strictly technical one. In accepting this analogy, we propose to explore it at three levels, at the material, at the spatial and at the temporal level.”
Publication: 2027
Submissions should be sent to: porouscapes@darq.uc.pt
More information: https://porouscapes.uc.pt/
