Sophia Journal es una revista académica, de acceso abierto y revisada por pares, publicada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura y Urbanismo (CEAU) - Grupo de Investigación Arquitectura, Arte e Imagen (AAI) de la Facultad de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Oporto, Portugal (FAUP), en colaboración con la asociación Cityscopio y su sello editorial scopio Editions.
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Photography as an Instrument of Modern Construction
This editorial examines photography as a critical instrument in the construction, interpretation, and preservation of modern architecture and landscape. Drawing on a series of case studies, it argues that photography does more than record completed works; it actively reveals the technical, spatial, social, and cultural processes through which modern environments are produced and understood. The analysis begins with Mogens Lassen’s collective housing at Ordrupvej 70, where construction photographs document the innovative Systemhuset sliding steel formwork system and demonstrate how technical experimentation shaped modern architectural form. It then considers aerial photography in Tibor Farkas’s planning work for Hungary’s Lake Balaton region, showing how the elevated view evolved from a compositional tool into a means of detecting environmental degradation and fostering ecological awareness. In Caracas, comparative photographic records of modern public housing projects expose the tension between the political image of progress promoted in the 1950s and the later informal adaptations made by residents. The article also discusses Bernd and Hilla Becher’s systematic documentation of industrial structures, highlighting photography’s role in recognising obsolete industrial buildings as architectural and cultural heritage. Finally, the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens is presented as an example of how photography and documentary film can support research, community engagement, and the transmission of landscape memory. Across these examples, photography emerges as a polyvalent medium: a record of construction, a tool of analysis, a witness to social transformation, and a catalyst for heritage preservation. The article concludes that visual documentation is not secondary to architectural practice, but central to understanding the relationship between modernity, technology, territory, memory, and cultural value.
Derechos de autor 2025 Jaime J. Ferrer Forés https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Iñaki Bergera’s Poetics of Abandonment. Siza in Panticosa
This essay examines Iñaki Bergera’s Poetics of Abandonment: Siza in Panticosa as a long-term photographic investigation into the unfinished High Performance Centre designed by Álvaro Siza in the Spanish Pyrenees. Rather than treating the work as a simple record of architectural decay, the essay argues that Bergera’s book offers a critical and poetic reflection on the relationship between architecture, photography, time, and landscape. The abandoned CAR building is presented as an architecture suspended between intention and entropy, completion and deterioration, failure and latent possibility. Through a restrained visual language, Bergera avoids both denunciation and nostalgia, adopting instead a precise, almost forensic mode of observation that reveals the contradictions of the site. The essay highlights the importance of sequencing in the book, relating Bergera’s photographic journey to the idea of the promenade architecturale and to phenomenological understandings of spatial perception. The images guide the viewer through a mental and perceptual experience of the building, allowing photography to reconstitute movement, time, and atmosphere. Abandonment is interpreted not merely as physical decay but as a layered temporal condition, transforming the building into a palimpsest where traces of exposure, erosion, and incompletion coexist with the persistence of Siza’s architectural intentions. The essay also introduces the notion of “false ruins” to describe structures that were never fully inhabited and whose ruinous appearance results from interrupted expectations rather than historical decline. In this context, Bergera’s photographs expose the economic, social, and political forces behind abandonment while preserving the dignity and ambiguity of the architecture. Ultimately, the essay presents Poetics of Abandonment as a significant contribution to debates on architectural photography, showing how photographic practice can act simultaneously as documentation, interpretation, and contemplation, and how abandoned architecture can become a privileged space for rethinking architectural meaning. Cover Image: Poética del abandono: Siza en Panticosa by Iñaki Bergera
Derechos de autor 2026 Pedro Neto, Iñaki Bergera https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Exploring, documenting and narrating landscapes. An interview about the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens
We present an interview on the experience of The International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens, organised since 1990 by the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche and awarded for the 33rd time in 2024. This Prize is a research project focused on the study and care of places particularly rich in natural, historical, and creative values. One of the key features of this Prize is that it is awarded to specific places recognized for their value, rather than necessarily to iconic objects. The mission of the Prize is precisely to study and communicate the values identified by the Scientific Committee in the selected places. Often, these are landscapes and specific places created through the meticulous efforts of the communities living there (e.g., the Tea Gardens of Dazhangshan in China or the Wild Apple Forests of the Tien Shan in Kazakhstan), or landscapes that exist thanks to a very close relationship between forms of life and forms of land (e.g., the Jardín de Cactus in Lanzarote or the Valleys of Güllüdere and Kızılçukur in Cappadocia). Reflecting on the different editions of this Prize, we see a selection of positive past and present experiences, many of which are not yet sufficiently recognized as good examples and practices. After the selection, research, and documentation stages, the activities related to the Prize include two books (usually in Italian and in English), numerous public events, an exhibition, and, since 2014, the production of a documentary film dedicated to the awarded place, its history, and its transformations. For this reason, this Prize can also be considered as an important platform to reflect on the role of photography and documentary film in shaping a contemporary way of narrating and understanding these challenging landscapes. Cover Image: The film crew in action on the site, Berlin 2022, photo by Marco Zanin, Copyright Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche
Derechos de autor 2026 Giulia Marino, Luigi Latini, Patrizia Boschiero, Davide Gambino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This essay examines photography and visual art as critical tools for understanding contemporary urban conflict, marginality, and collective memory. Centred on the recurring question “Who do cities belong to?”, it connects historical moments of urban protest, from Paris in 1968 to anti-tourism graffiti in Barcelona and Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Portland, with the ways cities become stages for social claims, rebellion, and symbolic repair. The text focuses first on Carrie Mae Weems’s documentation of plywood barriers erected during the 2020 Portland protests. These defensive panels, initially intended to protect shops and offices from damage, are reinterpreted as temporary public canvases carrying graffiti, murals, erasures, and political lament. Through Weems’s photographic gaze, these ephemeral surfaces gain archival and aesthetic value, preserving civic anger even when the original images are painted over or destroyed. The essay situates this work within a longer artistic tradition of testimony and accusation, invoking Goya, Picasso, Chillida, and Malevich to show how images of suffering and protest endure as collective memory. The second part turns to Miyamoto Ryūji’s Cardboard Houses, presented through Mengfei Pan’s reading of improvised shelters built by people excluded from the formal city. Here, the city’s fissures, waste materials, and marginal spaces become the ground for fragile forms of survival. Unlike the painted plywood of Portland, these cardboard structures are not conceived aesthetically; their purpose is protection and persistence. Yet Miyamoto’s photographs reveal their symbolic force, making visible those whom urban systems tend to erase. Together, the works discussed suggest that photography transforms temporary, marginal, or disposable urban traces into enduring acts of witness. The essay argues that cities are layered, contested, and continuously remade by protest, exclusion, memory, and survival. Ultimately, it asks readers to reconsider urban belonging and to recognize visual documentation as a powerful means of preserving marginalized urban voices.
Derechos de autor 2026 Félix Solaguren-Beascoa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Holy Hope Cemetery (founded in 1907 in Tucson, Arizona) was the city’s first Catholic cemetery that was not directly a part of a parish. The upkeep of the graves used to depend on the families of the deceased, but over time the state diocese took on the commitment. With all this, structural inequality and neglect have progressively deteriorated the cemetery. It is currently divided into two clearly differentiated sectors. On the one hand, the northwest sector (the historic core of the complex), where the remains of Mexican citizens are buried. There are signs of neglect, with graves without tombstones, levels of uncleanliness and a disrespectful use of the space. It is known locally as “the place of the forgotten”, and contrasts with the second sector, the southeast, set aside for well-off families. This division symbolises a social frontier that transcends mere architecture. Without knowing the history of the cemetery, in 2022 I had the chance to explore it. I documented its state of repair and life through a photographic project, The American Dream, which sets out to retrieve and showcase the memory of the Mexican heartland of Holy Hope Cemetery. Some of these photographs were exhibited in 2025 in Almería (Spain) and were well received, despite the modesty of the exhibition. However, it is paramount to continue sharing the reality of this architecture until another one can ultimately be related and portrayed. This visual essay reveals Holy Hope Cemetery as a wounded landscape and calls for its repair. Cover Image: Mass grave
Derechos de autor 2026 Alicia Angustias Fernández Barranco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Deleitosa is my village. It is located in the province of Cáceres, in the region of Extremadura in Spain. Here my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and other ancestors were born, going back through centuries of family genealogy. Deleitosa was the village that Eugene Smith chose to realize in his photographic essay “Spanish Village” that was published in the American magazine Life on April 9, 1951. Far from showing the perceptible appearance of Deleitosa or some of the visual references linked to what was a photographic icon of the social and economic backwardness in Spanish rural society, my gaze has some subjective nuances linked to a series of experiences, places and personal memories. Reminiscences that have endured as apparitions in my memory. Images that intermingle episodes that float in my imagination with the new realities that coexist in the village. There is an emotional need to reflect on the territory of which we are part. To explore our identity in the echo of the places that still speak to us, or in the absence-presence of the people and beings that inhabit them. To form a visual interpretation that evokes the mystery that manifests itself in everyday rhythms, in the poetic condition that underlies the strange. Cover Image: Where Fireflies Unfold
Derechos de autor 2026 Oskar Alvarado https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Making Temporal Landscapes: A Visual Essay on Snow, Site, and Seeing
Making Temporal Landscapes: A Visual Essay on Snow, Site, and Seeing explores the relationship between landscape, perception, and the physical act of engagement through a process developed at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) since 2019. In these workshops, first-year landscape architecture and architecture students are introduced to an extended form of fieldwork that aims to expand their initial reading of public space. The essay describes a pedagogical approach, conducted in 2025, that combines embodied experience and material transformation as a way to engage with place. The workshop highlights the value of fieldwork in design education. By working directly on site, students learn to understand landscape through both action and reflection. The process moves them beyond a first person perspective into a position where space can be observed from the outside. Through images, the body becomes an instrument for measuring and framing. The temporary nature of the interventions, both as photographs and spatial forms, opens a discussion about the relationship between what is constructed, what is left behind, and what continues to change in the landscape. Cover Image: To Reinforce - 2025 - Lars Hovland
Derechos de autor 2026 Mattias F. Josefsson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Plywood Publics: Thin Politics in Carrie Mae Weems’s Painting the Town
Carrie Mae Weems’s Painting the Town documents the traces of a politically charged moment in the recent history of Portland, Oregon where protests in the name of Black lives in the summer of 2020 quickly became a nightly ritual as buildings, authorities, and demonstrators alike armored themselves for gradual escalation. These photographs of boarded-up storefronts with plywood painted to cover the liberatory messages once carried by graffiti stage a confrontation with the material reality of erasure. Unlike much of her photographic work, Weems’s series here is largely evacuated of space and human figures, and is presented in large scale and in full color. This paper considers this shift in light of Weems’s previous interrogations of architecture and urban space in series such as The Louisiana Project, Roaming, and Museums and in conversation with related developments in new art photography from artists such as Thomas Demand and Thomas Ruff, who have been positioned as protagonists of confrontational and surface-oriented work in “the tableau form.” Critically, the approach of Weems’s work in Painting the Town also supports both a formal and a political turn away from a theater of inclusion to a demand for justice, solidarity, and a resistance to erasure. Reading the photographs alongside recent theoretical work from Ruha Benjamin and Xine Yao advocating a renewed attention to the “thin description” of surfaces and to the liberatory potential of antisocial affect among marginalized communities suggests how survival necessitates a move beyond the reparative. Cover Image: Carrie Mae Weems. 2006. Palazzo Dei Congressi, Mussolini Rome
Derechos de autor 2026 Justin Fowler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
“Nobody’s ever seen the High Line1”: Joel Sternfeld and the image of the High Line that led to its rehabilitation.
This article analyses the way in which a photographic work can participate in both the safeguarding and the transformation of an infrastructure whose heritage value was contested at the time. The article traces the importance of Joel Sternfeld’s photographs in the process of safeguarding the West Side Freight Line, which has since become the famous High Line Park, one of New York’s most visited landmarks. The article is based on an analysis of the genesis and course of the photographs (in order to analyse their dissemination strategies and reception) and on the discourses of various protagonists. In this example, the relationship between the photographer and his clients, as well as the way the photographs were exhibited and made visible, reflect a conscious desire to put the quality of a renowned photographer at the service of creating a positive collective imagination around a then little-known and littleappreciated infrastructure. While this approach did indeed help save the threatened building, it was also accompanied by a symbolic shift, in which images effectively replaced reality, directly influencing the High Line’s restoration projects and their reception by both the general public and the sponsors. 1 Joel Sternfeld, 2002. New York Voices: Joel Sternfeld,. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNzr7g8FQgk watched on 01.02.2023. Cover Image: Joel Sternfeld. 2000. Walking the High Line, Looking East on 30th Street on a Morning in May, courtesy of Joel Sternfeld
Derechos de autor 2025 Oscar Barnay https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Scaffolding Styles: Aesthetics of Iron Construction
The landscape that offers the city is unfinished and uncertain. It is full of temporary structures serving restorations, repairs, or new permanent and static works. The purpose of these construction elements is not their own aesthetic, theoretical, or functional value, but to evoke the value of something else — that which is to come. However, even though these elements are intended to be nothing more than a transient presence, they inevitably transform the city and its aesthetics. It is common to treat these elements with contempt and to devalue them because of their temporariness. This article aims to explore the aesthetic condition of temporary metal structures by examining the philosophical debate that took place during the nineteenth century on the use of steel in architecture. These discussions, together with photographs taken between the 1920s and 1930s of permanent industrial metal structures, were fundamental in establishing a new vision and aesthetic of industrial landscapes. Cover Image: Pont Transbordeur (1905) and Harbor of Marseilles. Archiv S. Giedion, Institut fur Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH - Honggerberg, Zurich.
Derechos de autor 2025 Sol Diéguez Garcia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Icarian Archive (1987-1992) A Reinterpretation of a Photographic Collection
Barcelona’s nomination as the host city for the 1992 Olympic Games led to significant urban redevelopment in the city. One of these projects involved the transformation of the waterfront of the Poblenou neighborhood; Avinguda d’Icària (Icaria Avenue) structured this area, which was characterized by factories, workshops, and railway tracks. This is where a new residential neighborhood, the Olympic Village, was built. The scale and impact —both physical and social— of this project made it comparable to other major transformations such as the 1888 Universal Exposition, the opening of Via Laietana that began in 1908, or the 1929 Universal Exposition. In July 1987 the demolition of the Icaria neighborhood began. In this construction zone, Martí Llorens began a creative photographic project using a pinhole camera, a camera in which the lens is replaced by a tiny hole. Soon after, this project led him to document, with conventional photographic equipment, the construction of the new neighborhood until 1992. Almost forty years have passed since the beginning of the demolitions in Poblenou. The relationship we have with photography today is very different from the one we had at the end of the 20th century, as are the links created with everything seen and imagined through it. Now, by digitizing and viewing on screen the photographs of what we now call the Icarian Archive, an interesting and fruitful transversal re-reading is generated that endows these images with new meanings. Having lost their physical nature, it seems that these photographs demand to be approached and interpreted from other parameters. Our relationship with all of them seems to have changed and, of course, also with the city they show. The need to recontextualize and reinterpret their contents in different layers, creating new links, is an essential part of this article. Cover Image: © Martí Llorens. Demolition of the old railway building ‘Servicio Eléctrico’ in Avinguda d’Icària 6-8. Triptych made with the pinhole camera. 1989. Icarian Archive / Factoria Heliográfica collection.
Derechos de autor 2025 Martí Llorens, Rebecca Mutell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The art duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, renowned for their focus on documenting obsolete industrial structures destined to disappear, gave birth to a work at the intersection of different genres, which contributed to revolutionizing the course of late 20th-century photography. In the present work, the inherent documentary value of their photographs will be highlighted, while also shedding light on a shifting perception of landscape appreciation, particularly related to the iconic exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, in which they participated as the only two Europeans among ten artists. Consideration will be given to how their work contributed to the development of industrial archaeology in the Ruhr, where their systematic documentation of vanishing industrial sites played a crucial role in redefining heritage preservation. The case of Zeche Zollern, an Art Nouveau industrial complex in Dortmund, will be examined as a concrete example of how their photographs influenced the recognition and conservation of industrial heritage. Finally, their work will be contextualized within contemporary environmental discourse, particularly in relation to the Anthropocene, emphasizing how their images raise critical questions about sustainability, the transformation of post-industrial landscapes, and the evolving relationship between industry and the environment. Cover Image: Bernd Becher, Eisernhardter Tiefbau Mine, Eisern, Germany, 1955/56, Graphite and watercolor on paper. © Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher.
Derechos de autor 2025 Giulia Incicco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Photographic Narratives of Modern Public Housing in Venezuela Across Two Moments
Unidad de Habitación Cerro Grande and Comunidad 2 de Diciembre, renamed Comunidad 23 de Enero after the overthrow of Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s military regime, are two public housing projects developed in Caracas, Venezuela, by the Taller de Arquitectura del Banco Obrero (TABO) during the 1950s. Both are part of the selection of Caracas buildings for the Interactive Atlas | Visual Register of Urban Architecture | Latin America 1940–1970, developed within the framework of two research projects on the relationship between photography and architecture in Latin America, directed by Professor Cristina Gastón Guirao at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia: “Recovery and Dissemination of Photographic Archives of Modern Architecture for the Development of an Operational Visual Heritage” and “Architecture, Photography and the City: Geolocation and Comparative Study of Photographic Records of Modern Architecture.” This paper focuses on a selection of photographs of both complexes corresponding to two different moments in their history: the first during and shortly after their construction, the second in the present day. Through images from both periods, the article examines the modern image of progress that the dictatorship attempted to project, alongside the architectural principles, design strategies, and values pursued by the architects. By comparing early images of both projects, Cerro Grande from the first years and 2 de Diciembre from the final stages of the workshop’s brief existence, it is possible to identify the concessions and reductions imposed on the architects due to budgetary constraints and, more significantly, the tight deadlines required to align with the regime’s propaganda program. Finally, the recent photographs offer insight into the deterioration and ongoing challenges these housing complexes face today, while also highlighting the enduring formal and spatial qualities of the original architecture and the everyday life it continues to sustain. Cover image: Guido Bermúdez, Unidad de Habitación Cerro Grande, Taller de Arquitectura TABO, Caracas. Photograph by Julio Mesa, 2023.
Derechos de autor 2025 María Fernanda Jaua https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Modularity and Prefabrication: Analysis of the Collective Housing at Ordrupvej No. 70 by Mogens Lassen and Engineer Ishøy
This study examines the evolution of functionalism in Denmark through the lens of the collective housing project at Ordrupvej No. 70 (1937), a landmark work by architect Mogens Lassen (1901–1987) and engineer Ernst Ishøy (1890–1959). The analysis situates the project within the broader context of Danish functionalism, contrasting the international influences of figures such as Le Corbusier (1887–1965) and Walter Gropius (1883–1969) with the local “functional tradition” articulated by architects like Kay Fisker (1893–1965), C.F. Møller (1898–1988), and Arne Jacobsen (1902–1971). A key focus of the inquiry is on the innovative construction techniques employed at Ordrupvej No. 70, particularly the use of a patented sliding formwork system known as Systemhuset. This system facilitated a rapid and cost-effective construction process and is critically analyzed in terms of its contribution to modularity and prefabrication in residential architecture. The central hypothesis is that Ordrupvej 70 represents not only a technical achievement but also a cultural negotiation between Danish tradition and international modernism, anticipating later debates on industrialized housing. The study is further enriched by historical photographs documenting the construction process. These images capture the intermediate stages of the building’s evolution, providing visual evidence of the methods and challenges associated with the implementation of the new construction system. This photographic documentation is integral to understanding the dynamic process of construction and the practical application of modular techniques in mid- 20th-century Danish architecture. Overall, the analysis highlights the contribution of Lassen and Ishøy’s collaboration as one of the earliest and most coherent experiments in integrating modular construction and prefabrication into collective housing, offering new perspectives for the historiography of modern architecture in Scandinavia. Cover image: House of the future
Derechos de autor 2025 Josep Oriol Ferrer Frau https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Aerial Photography as a New Perspective in Planning and Rehabilitation : Regional Conceptualizations along the Danube and around Lake Balaton in Socialist Hungary
Aerial photography has also influenced the modern interpretation of the landscape and the development of modern architectural concepts. An example of this is the aerial photo series documenting the developments of the Lake Balaton Region by Hungarian architects. The modernization of the largest lake in Central and Eastern Europe, has also achieved significant recognition in the international professional history. However, aerial photos soon played an important role in ecological restoration beyond planning. The Balaton resort project started in 1957 with a new scale and methodology of regional planning process. The project leader was Tibor Farkas, who continuously documented the transformation of the landscape by taking aerial photos from an airplane. These aerial photos provide the primary material for the research. The photos also show the interpretation of the landscape and the formation of architectural concepts. A year earlier, he had successfully prepared the regional plan for the Mohács Island recovery after floods on the Danube. In this process, he already experimented with the use of aerial photography as a design tool and used the experiences in the planning of the Balaton region. The innovative methodology of the Balaton regional plan, which he developed together with Charles Polónyi, later a member of TEAM 10, integrated the scales of architecture, urban planning and regional planning. The Balaton plan was successfully presented at international forums, including the regional planning congress in Liege in 1958 and the last CIAM forum in Otterlo in 1959. In 1965, the Patrick Abercrombie Prize of the UIA was dedicated to “Tibor Farkas and his team” for the integrated methodical treatment of landscape and architectural values. The Balaton regional plan brought a new scale of planning not only to architects and urban planners, but also to the garden designers who worked closely with them. Over time, the modernization of the landscape also brought ecological problems to the fore. In contrast to the visual landscape interpretation of architecture, a more complex landscape interpretation of ecology was needed, which also revalued the role of architecture. The development of Hungarian landscape architecture can also be linked to the Balaton project, when earlier garden designers began to develop landscape-scale concepts, which soon resulted in the institutionalization of landscape architecture and the launch of university education. Cover image: Aerial Photo, Zánka, 1972. Balaton Region. Source: Archive of Tibor Farkas
Derechos de autor 2025 Domonkos Wettstein https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This editorial introduces three visual essays that explore landscape as a field of perception, memory, intervention and repair. Cristina Gastón and Judit Taberna frame images not simply as records of territory, but as means through which landscapes may be documented, interpreted and redefined. The selected projects—Mattias F. Josefsson’s Making Temporal Landscapes, Oskar Alvarado’s Where Fireflies Unfold, and Alicia F. Barranco’s The American Dream—offer markedly different, yet complementary, approaches to seeing and understanding place. Josefsson’s visual essay examines the transformation of the Norwegian landscape through snow. Developed during a four-day workshop with first-year architecture and landscape students, the project uses performative actions and photography to investigate site, scale and perception. The temporary interventions create subtle spatial forms that disappear with the thaw, yet the pedagogical knowledge gained remains embedded in future acts of seeing and design. Alvarado’s Where Fireflies Unfold revisits the Spanish village of Deleitosa from an intimate and imaginative perspective. Distancing itself from W. Eugene Smith’s 1951 representation of rural deprivation, the series draws on ancestral memory and childhood experience. Through nocturnal images, low directed light and an atmosphere of mystery, the work invites viewers to complete the meaning of the landscape through their own interpretation. Barranco’s The American Dream presents Holy Hope Cemetery in Tucson, Arizona, as a socially divided and wounded landscape. Her colour photographs reveal the contrast between ordered, maintained burial grounds and neglected areas associated with marginalised communities. The cemetery becomes a visual chronicle of inequality, memory and the need for repair. Together, these essays demonstrate how photography can mediate between direct action, attentive observation and critical documentation. They show landscape as temporal, inhabited and politically charged, while affirming the visual essay as a powerful form for reflecting on how places are shaped, remembered and transformed.
Derechos de autor 2025 Cristina Gastón, Judit Taberna https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The aesthetics of architecture during the construction process
This editorial examines the aesthetic and documentary value of architectural photography during construction, demolition, ruin and urban transformation. Cristina Gastón and Judit Taberna argue that buildings in transitional states possess a distinctive visual power, because they expose provisional forms, hidden structures and spatial conditions that disappear once architecture reaches its completed or functional phase. Through three photographic projects, the editorial demonstrates how images can reveal the material, temporal and imaginative dimensions of the built environment in moments of change. The first case, Martí Llorens’s Icarian Archive, records the demolition of Barcelona’s industrial Icaria neighbourhood and the subsequent construction of the Olympic Village. Combining pinhole and conventional photography, Llorens’s extensive collection documents both a city in transition and photography itself in transition, as analogue practices gave way to digital technologies. His work shows the photograph as a portal to vanished urban worlds whose historical value increases over time. The second case, Sol Diéguez García’s study of scaffolding in New York, reframes a widely criticised urban nuisance as an aesthetic and historical phenomenon. By focusing on contemporary scaffolding and its visual connection to nineteenth-century debates on iron construction, the article suggests that temporary structures can reshape the perception of iconic architecture, including the Flatiron Building. The third case, Oscar Barnay’s analysis of Joel Sternfeld’s photographs of the High Line, highlights photography’s capacity to influence public opinion, preservation campaigns and urban design. Sternfeld’s seasonal images transformed an obsolete railway into a compelling landscape, helping to support its rehabilitation as a public park. Overall, the editorial presents photographic reportage as a critical medium for discovering the concealed structures, provisional conditions and latent possibilities that underpin visible architectural form. It positions construction photography not as secondary documentation, but as a means of interpreting urban change, memory and architectural imagination.
Derechos de autor 2025 Cristina Gastón https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Visual Practices, Architectural Memory and the Transformation of Public Space
This introductory text frames Sophia Journal’s tenth volume as the beginning of a new thematic cycle devoted to “landscapes of repair”. Building on the journal’s established concern with architecture, the city, photography, film and visual culture, it argues that visual practices should not be treated merely as tools of representation, but as critical methods of architectural research and knowledge production. Repair is presented as a complex cultural, political and ecological process, one that extends beyond technical restoration to include memory, heritage, social practices and future imaginaries. Within this framework, landscape is understood as a dynamic condition: material, cultural and imaginative at once, shaped by social, ecological, political and technological forces. The text places particular emphasis on modern and contemporary architecture, especially those recent architectural legacies that remain insufficiently recognised despite their influence on urban life. It proposes photography and film as means of revealing hidden values, contested meanings and processes of transformation that are often overlooked by conventional historiography. The volume’s contributions are organised around three sections: Modernity 50s–60s, Intermediate States and Other Realities. Together, these sections trace a critical movement from the documentation of modern architectural heritage, through transitional and provisional conditions, to marginal or alternative spaces that challenge dominant narratives. Across the issue, visual media are shown to activate architectural memory, question the status of archives, and expose the unstable relationship between design intention and lived reality. The editorial readings, theoretical papers, interviews and visual essays collectively demonstrate how images can register construction, decay, renewal, conflict and social appropriation. They also suggest that repair must be understood symbolically as well as materially, since the way architecture is seen, narrated and remembered influences how it may be transformed. Ultimately, the text advances a humanist approach to architectural and urban change, arguing that photography and film can help imagine more inclusive, resilient and sustainable futures.
Derechos de autor 2025 Pedro Neto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Throughout my artistic personal career, my projects have explored housing not so much as a collective phenomenon but rather in relation to the territory or the urban context, understood as a space for the exception, always conditioned by some kind of latency, transition or abandonment. Public housing would therefore serve very specific interests that, outwardly, escape the territories where my gaze has felt attracted and even comfortable. Typologically, I have felt attracted by the “house” in its objectual condition, from its reiteration and seriation, as it already happened in the series “Twentysix (abandoned) gasoline stations”. In 2021 the magazine AV1 published the series “Collecting Homes” in dialogue with other somewhat analogous series such as “Typologies” by Bruno Fontana or “Free Architecture” by Adam Wiseman. However, that same article already put on the table other views that penetrate into the domestic sphere, into the interior of the dwelling, where the experience of collective dwelling really takes place: Todd Hido’s work “House Hunting” illuminates the gloom of the anodyne American suburban spaces by illuminating the inhabited interior and, for their part, Bogdan Girbovan’s “10/1” and Michael Wolf’s “100x100” series delve into the relationship between the repetitive collective domestic space and the way in which the inhabitant and his objects shape and qualify it. It is surely in this introverted territory where the reflection of contemporary photography is forged in relation to collective habitation, which in turn reflects a socioeconomic palpitation derived, on the one hand, from the radical experience of the worldwide confinement of the Covid-19 pandemic and, on the other, the unavoidable crisis of public housing as a political project, unable to respond in many countries to the housing urgency strained by real estate speculation and, consequently, by the high prices of sale and rent. In both cases, society has rediscovered a need that goes beyond the right to decent housing. It is in the home where the person, the individual and his immediate family nucleus, builds his genuine identity, the sphere of his intimacy. The house counts, I insist, not only at a satisfactory level of a basic need —for protection or shelter— but as a configurator of that which makes us truly individuals who then project that experience from the private to the public and collective, to the social. (...) Cover image: Weissenhof-Siedlung, 2013. Le Corbusier, Stuttgart, 1927 1 “Documentos dobles”, AV Monografías, nº 237, 2021, p. 8.
Derechos de autor 2025 Iñaki Bergera https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Housing the basque country. Photography of the collective space
In 2018, Housing the Basque Country (HBC) opened in Bilbao. The exhibition sought to expose the results of the housing policy achieved by the Basque Regional Government in the last three decades. HBC aimed to explain the different stories generated around public housing since this subject is, without a doubt, one of those that brings together the most realities around it: from politics to the architectural, going through the economic or productive, the sociological, historical and legal; setting at the center the inhabitant. From the exhibition point of view, HBC started with the difficulty of highlighting for a nonprofessional audience a theme limited both by its geographical location and by its distance from spectacular architecture. It was decided to compile a selection of thirty projects that served to explain the evolution of public housing, taking into account criteria such as their date of completion, geographical distribution, location in cities or small towns, typological advances, and aesthetic values. But the projects were also selected for their potential to capture something that seemed essential to incorporate into the exhibition: the human dimension. Thus, and during several trips to the thirty projects, it was possible to compile a valuable set of visual documents containing the “vital substance” that had grown in those environments. Various photographs in different formats explained aspects such as the current state of these residential complexes, their urban life, the physical traces of time, the dialogue with nature, the validity or expiration of their architecture and urban planning, and their social content. For better or for worse, the aim of that work was not to achieve an aesthetically striking photographic collection, but rather to bear witness to the literal and direct presentation of the urban - and therefore human - result in force in those inhabited environments. Cover image: Zabalgana (Vitoria-Gasteiz)
Derechos de autor 2025 Asier Santas Asier Santas Torres, Luis Suárez Mansilla, Luis Asín https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The right distance: Photographing the neighbourhoods built under the Carnation Revolution
In the preface to his book Why people photograph, Robert Adams mentions a recurring idea in his writings: “the effort we all make, photographers and nonphotographers, to affirm life without lying about it”. This was the challenge for visiting today the neighbourhoods built under SAAL, a housing program implemented during the Portuguese revolutionary period that sought to improve the housing conditions of the poorest classes based on a collective effort and the aspiration for a more equitable life for all. Photographing the neighbourhoods built under the Carnation Revolution required the openness to understand the life and the different fates that each neighbourhood has had, 50 years on since the 25th of April, in an effort to escape an outdated and nostalgic/melancholic gaze linked to the moment of its conception. Besides trying to understand the characteristics of the neighbourhoods in terms of its integrity, community life, conservation and ownership, this work also required a willingness to establish a link to affections, contributing to the multiplication of hypotheses in the construction of an imaginary, where ideas of time, restriction and freedom fit in. The construction of a dialogue is fundamental for promoting an encounter, a negotiated proximity between the photographer and the depicted objects, similar to what John Berger suggests about the act of painting. Perhaps this negotiation, or the search for the right distance, can be an approach to the affirmation of life. Cover image: Fonsecas-Calçada, Lisbon, SAAL neighbourhood, 2023.
Derechos de autor 2025 Ana Catarina Costa, Francisco Ascensão https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Public housing from within: childhood memories as a landscape of care
This visual and auto-ethnographic essay – through research in private archives and childhood memories – aims to reconstruct the history of a public housing building on the Place du Marché in a small town in the Paris suburbs, Viry-Châtillon, and to show the transformation of the ideal of public and social housing in the suburbs of the capital. Through amateur and family photographs, we will examine the organisation, construction and transformation of this site at three key moments: the 1950s, the 2000s and the present day. This method of photographic analysis, which is also intended to be artistic, brings together the personal archives taken by my grandmother, the photographs taken by the author in 2004, and the photos taken by my grandmother again, in 2024, whom I asked, using a disposable camera, to take a portrait of the public housing building in which my flat was located and the urban context in which it is inserted. The result is a mixture of photographs taken in different temporalities and geographies that create a multifaceted portrait of public housing as a landscape of care based on childhood memories. Cover image: me and my parents on the balcony of our apartment (1997) author: my grandmother.
Derechos de autor 2025 Chloé Darmon https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Collective Housing by Collective Practice: The Inclined Condominium in Bergamo
In 1972 Bergamo municipality identified new areas within the city’s fabric to build public housing developments. In one of these areas a few years later was built a housing project called Terrazze Fiorite (Flower Terraces). The intervention was designed by four architects who in those years had co-signed several significant works in the city: W. Barbero, B. Ciagà, G. Gambirasio and G. Zenoni. These architects during the 1960s and 1970s had worked side by side as a group. Terrazze Fiorite is the result of this kind of collaboration. The housing intervention draws a new portion of the city through a low-rise, high-intensity settlement model with L-shape housing units, arranged around patios. The apparent banality of the intervention, however, conceals an interesting spatial expedient: the settlement pattern is placed on an artificial sloping plane obtained by a continuous and slight staggering of houses arranged one after the other. The slope becomes an opportunity to develop a landscape of uninterrupted pedestrian paths characterized by continuous variations, thanks to excavations that host lush gardens and squares or flat areas near the house entrances. A complex scenery to allow inhabitants a neighborhood sociability in different degrees, where everyone is free to live the space without any kind of barriers. The essay aims to offer, through worlds and original photographs, a point of view on this housing project highlighting the spatial links established among citizens, buildings, landscape and city. Cover image: Entrance door with informal green
Derechos de autor 2025 Loris Luigi Perillo, Lorenzo de Pascale, Federica Mambrini https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Differentiated inhabitation of ‘auteur architecture’: photographing Álvaro Siza’s Bouça housing estate
This paper explores the different ways residents of famous buildings experience the architecture they live in. We aim at an architectural photography that seeks to portray architecture not as a visual phenomenon but rather a lived one. We have photographed residents of the Bouça housing estate in Porto, Portugal, designed in the 1970s by Pritzker Prize winning Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza to house the urban poor after the 1974 revolution. The estate has since become an architectural icon and is currently undergoing gentrification by architects, designers and artists who are drawn to the appeal of ‘auteur architecture’. The differences in inhabitation between the original residents and the recent ones pertain to a complex yet dualistic stance between two distinct social classes on what architecture is and what it means, one that also raises the issue of housing for the urban poor becoming fashionable. We read such tensions while tracing back to Siza’s early belief in a classless society, which later evolved into the belief in an ‘interclassist city’. Cover image: Costa et al., “Inhabiting Auteur Architecture.”
Derechos de autor 2025 Marta Machado, Paulo Catrica, Ana Catarina Costa, Eduardo Ascensão https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Right to the City (photo)voices: participatory photography with children in Greater Lisbon
The study “Voices of the Right to the City” consists of two participatory photography actions conducted in 2018 and 2021 by members of the Group of Socio-Territorial, Urban and Local Action Studies (GESTUAL). These actions involved children of African origin and Roma ethnicity from the self-produced neighbourhood Bairro da Torre in Greater Lisbon, who experienced a rehousing process that began in 2007 and concluded in 2023. Through a description and comparative analysis of the two actions and the data collected and by focusing on the neighbourhoods, housing and play spaces, we aim here to discuss the participants’ perceptions of changes in the places of their everyday lives before and after the rehousing process. Data collected includes the children’s own photographs, which have been obtained through photovoices, and interviews about these photographs, which were conducted through photoelicitation. We also seek to reflect on participatory photography as a research methodology. We argue that participatory photography can foster dialogue between researchers and research subjects, in our case children, offering an opportunity for the collective construction of knowledge. The results of this research highlight the urgent need to (re)think and (re)build cities in a way that ensures the voices of children and other vulnerable groups are heard and considered, thereby contributing to a just transformation of both the city and society.
Derechos de autor 2025 Rosa Arma, Camila Andrade dos Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Fenix architecture: Can a new and youth liveability for inner areas be based on the third and fourth-age community facilities?
The article takes its cue from the population ageing phenomenon in Italy, focusing on the country’s inner and marginal areas. These areas, which cover nearly 60% of the national territory, are facing significant challenges due to depopulation and the migration of young people to cities, leading to their marginalisation and reduced access to essential services. However, in recent decades, these regions have been reevaluated, viewing them not only as a problem but also as an opportunity for development and regeneration. The article explores how population ageing, traditionally seen as a challenge, can be transformed into a resource for the revitalization of inner areas. By analysing institutional policies such as the Strategia Nazionale per le Aree Interne (SNAI) and the Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR), the text emphasises the importance of attracting new communities, including younger generations, to revitalize these territories. In fact, ageing can become a development factor, especially when combined with strategic planning and targeted architectural design projects, as illustrated by the case of Castel del Giudice, a small village in Molise that has managed to turn population ageing into an opportunity for economic and social growth. The case study of Castel del Giudice demonstrates how an innovative approach to managing welfare services, particularly for the elderly, can help to reverse the depopulation trend and create new job opportunities for young people. Through the establishment of an assisted living facility and other community initiatives, the village has not only improved the quality of life for the elderly but also generated economic activity that has attracted new families to the area. This example shows how inner areas can become laboratories for good practices and social innovation if adequately supported by targeted policies and investments. In conclusion, the article argues that population ageing in Italian inner areas should not be seen merely as a problem to be addressed, but as an opportunity to stimulate sustainable and inclusive development. Through targeted interventions that promote proximity welfare and community cohesion, it is possible to create new forms of liveability that can attract both young and old, contributing to the revival of territories currently considered fragile. Ageing, therefore, can become a catalyst for the revitalization of inner areas, transforming their fragility into a driving force for future development. Cover image: Castel del Giudice, the district of community welfare devices composed by exiting (RSA and assisted residences) and new PNRR facilities (senior social housing and socio-economic aggregation center) – elaboration of the author.
Derechos de autor 2025 Federica Serra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Errante1: contemporary devices for heuristic reflexions on housing, Malagueira, Marselha, and La Borda.
This reflexion makes visible the relationships between humans and the production of the built environment, proposing an exploration of the behavioural space between two collaborative narratives: the disciplinary, and the non-disciplinary. The aim is to examine the position of architects and their practices in addressing the socioenvironmental crisis facing the planet today. Questioning architecture predominantly through a disciplinary lens limits the integration of practices that fall outside dominant narratives. In pedagogical frameworks, it is crucial to venture beyond these boundaries and question how to learn from divergent practices that inherently function as educational tools. Non-disciplinarily (by wandering about how bodies are perceived in its social context), we understand how these devices work and unmistakably broaden the field of architecture from multimodal design practices. However, divergent methods alone are insufficient for professionals to effectively engage with communities in addressing contemporary issues (within the built environment) due to formal constraints. This inadequacy suggests the emergence of an ideo-cultural crisis alongside the socio-environmental one, underscoring the urgent need to resolve a persistent educational paradox regarding the relationship between disciplinary, and non-disciplinary approaches. Through the analysis of three cases (Unité, Malagueira, and La Borda), the article identifies approaches that operate both within, and outside dominant narratives, relating complex scenarios as catalysts for simpler, more inclusive, and sustainable heuristic decisions. Positioned as a proposal for a viable landscape of sustainable social progression, the article engages in heuristic reflections to interrogate how robust mechanisms of loss - reconfigured as constructive actions - inform project activities. These activities, in turn, are examined for their capacity to steer architectural praxis toward an empathetic framework for architect-education, derived from the ethos of the field and practice of architecture. Cover image: 2024 Behavioural space “as” a place. La Borda. Barcelona, Spain. author’s photograph 1 Errante (english (UK): wandering): author’s translation, selected from Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, 1818. A work set in the Romantic period; it depicts a man standing before a rocky gorge while observing a landscape characterised by a thick sea of fog. A relationship between the sublime and self-reflection, based on the evocation of the landscape and on the contemplation of the man situated within the realisation of his drift in the time of his life.
Derechos de autor 2025 Sérgio Miguel Magalhães https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Hybrid Landscapes in the Pearl River Delta: The case of Macau Modern Housing’s approach
The present paper contemplates the ground of research on emerging forms of inhabiting spaces in contemporary urban territories, with a precise focus on Macau’s 1960s housing production. In order to settle a comprehensive understanding about inaugural statements of architectural modernity, in the field of modern housing, built in Pearl River Delta’s region as a hybrid interpretation of Modern Movement’s ideas in colonial Asian territory, this proposal aims to analyse and present a set of residential buildings and projects that show adaptations of Modern approaches to different cultures, climate, and environment. The achievement of such goals is to be developed through a comparative analysis, based on archival research and a photographic survey, in order to derive, on one hand, an amplitude equation of adopted materialised theoretical matrix (forms, urban scales); and on the other hand, to identify variations between housing typologies’ solutions, collective spaces, spatial distributions and technical systems (façade, cross-ventilation). This classification needs to consider contextual factors, identify problematics and potentialities, and recognise architectural roles within Macau’s generational urban growth. Portuguese and local pioneers in Macau, such as Manuel Vicente, Raul Chorão Ramalho and José Maneiras, have demonstrated how the modern conception could be interpreted, understood, and enriched in terms of content. They were able to face and respond to diverse physical and social conditions, experimenting innovative solutions which remain currently interesting and valid. This paper aims to document and value public housing works of other seas that, due to a tide of redevelopment guided by high commercial profit which seems not to consider the past, have not been conserved or valorised, and today may disappear. The landscape of care under analysis is part of the architectural scenario endangered of fade over time; his interaction with public interest and memory deserves further consideration. Cover image: Leal Senado Housing Tower, 2023, Macau; © Niccolò Arnaldo Galliano
Derechos de autor 2025 Niccolò Arnaldo Galliano, Daniela Arnaut, Ana Tostões https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Territory as Threshold: Images of Thought for a Non-Modern Landscape
French philosopher Bruno Latour (1947-2022) proposed an idea in his 1991 book “We Have Never Been Modern” that challenges the age-old notion of a clear distinction between Nature and culture or Man and object. According to Latour, the traditional attempts to separate the concept from its counterpart have failed. Instead, he argues that these concepts are interconnected and cannot be treated as separate entities. This principle can be applied to contemporary urban areas and the surrounding region, where the borders between the city and Nature are becoming increasingly blurred. Design plays a crucial role in conscious thinking and addressing the challenges of using natural resources, their impact on sustainability, and how we interconnect with sites and the Land. Furthermore, the relationship between urban areas and Nature is a critical issue that demands attention. These challenges are crucial for considering cities and landscapes and addressing them through design in terms of the territory. This act of design should tend towards a more holistic and integrated vision, which aligns with contemporary trends in various areas through a shift towards city projects that are less and less disruptive to the world. The conventional view of cities and Nature as separate entities is shifting towards an integrated perspective. This text deals with the territory as an agent of syntropy, as a link between the landscape and the city. The goal is to uncover how the relationship between the body and the territory can generate synergy in the system and create symbiotic relationships between the various parts involved. To achieve this, we will examine the available literature, starting from the central idea that we have never been modern. With this objective in mind, we will highlight the common areas to revisit the concept of assemblage. As a point of comparison, it is vital to closely examine Frank Lloyd Wright’s almost century-old text, The Disappearing City from 1932, and determine which aspects of his utopian vision remain relevant today. Regarding that text, Kenneth Frampton (b. 1930) highlights gradually erasing the distinction between the countryside and the city, like the ideology of the Communist Manifesto of 1872. Cover image: Nature - Culture, 2008, 38.836855, -7.578370, Author
Derechos de autor 2025 Luís Miguel Ginja https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Impact of care: Expanding Architectural education through Community Design-Build Projects
The influence of community-centered design and design-build projects on architectural education has increased in the last decade. Including student-led community-engaged projects in the curriculum of architecture schools has shaped architectural education and influenced the profession. These projects provide a service to communities or non-profit organisations in need of design solutions. Engaging social responsibility and public interest design represents an ideological shift in the way that architecture schools are approaching education. There is often an intersection of public interest design and design-build in these projects. This paper explores the question, can an academic community-based design-build project provide a new transitional housing prototype for the homeless? And, do these projects fulfil the needs of students to provide effective learning experiences for promoting their desire to promote communities they serve? Architecture schools provide learning experiences through various initiatives. For example, Yale University’s “The Yale Building Project,”1 Auburn University’s “Rural Studio”2 and University of Kansas “Studio 804”3 have had long-running public interest design studios. These designbuild initiatives educate students outside the typical design studio. This article will provide an overview of public interest and design-build education in the United States to provide context for introducing this into the curriculum at an Australian university. The Prefab 21 design-build studio is a partnership between the Deakin University School of Architecture and Built Environment, FormFlow, and Samaritan House, a shelter for homeless men, that focuses on the design and fabrication of a prototype house. This transdisciplinary project was accomplished in design studio and workshop sessions that designed, documented, and built an Independent Living Unit (ILU) and created a microvillage of seven ILUs at Samaritan House. This prototype has an extensive impact through it providing a new typology for transitional homeless accommodation and jobs in the region. Cover image: Samaritan House Microvillage Aerial View
Derechos de autor 2025 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0