Visual energies between bodies and museum spaces

SERIES: Visual energies between bodies and museum spaces
SPEAKER: Paolo Portoghesi
DATE: Thursday 13 October, 6 p.m.
PLACE: Sala del Refettorio

That museums and in general cultural activities connected with the arts are an important element of modern civilisation is a fact. What they actually convey to society is a subject that deserves in-depth investigation. The museum space is a meeting space; a meeting of real people, but also a meeting of people with the artistic products of different epochs and civilisations. Besides the traditional means of investigating this relationship created by institutions between citizens and the heritage of different places on earth, today it is also possible to make use of the achievements of vision neurologists, which not only enrich knowledge but can also point to new avenues of design. The subject of the lecture will be the analysis of the different means of investigation and the suggestions that these means can give to those who organise museum activities, not by passively accepting tradition but by trying to make the institutions a formative instrument for a democratic culture based on the encounter and exchange of experience and the freedom to interpret the products of culture. The problem of visual energy reaching our eyes and influencing our behaviour and thoughts will be considered from the point of view of an architect who has used the notion of place and space as essential factors for design theory.

Paolo Portoghesi (Rome 1931) is the battler of a "rooted" architecture that interprets tradition not as a transfer of acquired habits, but as a stimulus to innovation in continuity, and he has chosen Gustav Mahler's statement "Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire" as his teaching. His best-known work is the Mosque of Rome. His main works are: the Politeama theatre in Catanzaro, the churches of Santa Maria della Pace in Terni, Santi Cornelio e Cipriano in Calcata and San Francesco in Castellaneta, the Latin Quarter in Treviso, the Renaissance Quarter in Rome, the Mosque in Strasbourg, the Urban Park in Abano, the Cemetery in Cesena, the workshops of the 'City of Hope' in Padua. His most recent project is the Lamezia Terme con-cathedral, consecrated in 2019. He is professor emeritus at La Sapienza University, where he taught Geoarchitecture until 2021, and has received two honorary degrees. He is a former president of the Accademia di San Luca, an Academician of the Lincei and a member of numerous international academies. He has lectured at major European and American universities and almost all over the world. His most important books are: Roma Barocca, Francesco Borromini, After Modern Architecture, Architecture and Nature, The Hand of Palladio, The Smile of Tenderness. Readings on the Custody of Creation, Poetry of the Curve. Editor of historical architecture magazines such as "Controspazio" and "Eupalino", today he directs "Abitare la Terra".