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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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
“One evening I had a near-hallucinatory vision. The question-and-answer session that led up to this vision went something like this: Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behind my eyes. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious.”1 The almost century old, now well-known account by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto describes the creative process of his series ‘Theaters‘ (1976) as a kind of epiphany about image making whereby time is compressed into a single frame. Sugimoto’s quest for the single, total image had already been pursued by Western philosopher, Walter Benjamin in 1936. In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’, Benjamin announced a future marked by reproduction and the technical transformation of the nature of art with political implications. A couple of years earlier, the French poet Paul Valéry had already anticipated that very profound changes could be expected in relation to the arts, since all visual arts had until then featured a physical component that could no longer be considered or treated as before. Neither matter, nor space, nor time were the same anymore. In The Conquest of Ubiquity (“La conquete de l’ubiquité”) Valéry explains: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”2 Benjamin, Valéry, and others have outlined the framework for the theoretical principles that shape our contemporary visual culture. Today, we no longer expect our works of art to be published globally as one offs in physical or digital form. Instead, we are conditioned to reproduce any and every image at any moment, now, in real time and in any place. (...)
Derechos de autor 2024 Jorge Tárrago Mingo, Igea Troani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
"Each epoch dreams the one to follow. In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history (Urgeschichte)— that is, to elements of a classless society. And the experiences of such a society—as stored in the unconscious of the collective—engender, through interpenetration with what is new, the utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions."1 The contemporary urban landscape is traversed by complex layers of transformation, where architecture and territory overlap in dynamic processes of occupation, memory, and experimentation. In this panel, we bring together contributions that examine emerging forms of inhabiting and contemporary devices that reconfigure the relationship between the built environment and everyday life, particularly in vulnerable and hybrid territories. This panel addresses the complexities of designing and transforming hybrid and vulnerable territories. The papers and visual essays investigate how architecture responds to cultural, social, and environmental shifts, highlighting the necessity for innovative and context-sensitive approaches. Urban and hybrid landscapes are shaped and represented through photography and other visual media. In this context, the image plays a crucial role in capturing territorial transformations and the intricacies of spaces that defy modernist norms. The works utilise photography as a means to comprehend and convey the subtleties of contemporary urban interventions, offering a profound understanding of the interplay between the built environment and the cultural and social forces that shape it. (...)
Derechos de autor 2024 Maria Neto, Paz Núñez Martí https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
“The commodification of housing and urban land has turned what should be a basic human right into an instrument of speculative profit-making, systematically excluding the poor and reinforcing class divides within cities.” 1 What remains when housing is no longer considered a need or a right but a commodity? This question frames the urgency of rethinking how we conceive and produce space today. The idea that the home is a private, apolitical realm has long been dismantled by scholars such as Christopher Reed, who, in ‘Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture‘, frames domesticity as a contested cultural and political field.2 From this perspective, the contemporary housing crisis is not merely a failure of supply and demand mechanisms, but the manifestation of deep structural inequalities, demanding a fundamental redefinition of what it means to inhabit collectively. This panel examines how cooperative practices and participatory models challenge dominant paradigms by proposing new forms of collective living that emphasize agency, mutual support, and care as central to spatial production. John Turner’s influential argument in Housing by People — that when inhabitants control key decisions, housing becomes a source of individual and social well-being — remains highly relevant.3 Already in Freedom to Build (1972), Turner had introduced the idea of “housing as a verb,” stressing that housing should be understood not as a finished object, but as an active, ongoing process shaped by its users.4 Contemporary cooperative models adopt this perspective, framing housing as a living, adaptive system rather than a static commodity. (...)
Derechos de autor 2024 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
An editorial project as a catalyst for discussion and construction of architectural ideas: scopio Editions and Sophia Journal
The Sophia Journal editorial project, initiated at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP) and its R&D Centre for Architecture and Urbanism Studies (CEAU), is a pivotal platform for discussing and constructing architectural ideas through photography, film, and other visual media. This initiative fosters international engagement, bridging academia with various professional and creative communities interested in architecture, photography, and urban studies. At the core of Sophia Journal’s mission is integrating contemporary visual culture with architectural discourse, significantly influencing scholarly and public debates. This focus is reflected in a range of high-impact publications, including peer-reviewed issues, special thematic volumes, and the organization of international conferences. Since its founding in 2016, Sophia Journal has provided a rigorous academic space for critical inquiry into the intersection of architecture, urban transformation, and visual narratives. The journal’s international conferences, initiated in 2010 with On the Surface, have played a crucial role in fostering dialogue on architecture and visual culture. These events have helped establish a global research network, positioning Sophia Journal as a key reference for exploring the role of photography and film in architectural and urban studies. (...)
Catalyst for Discussion and Construction of Architectural Ideas
Public housing across multiple geographies: crossing theories and practices
Derechos de autor 2024 Pedro Leão Neto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Spatial interventions in vulnerable territories: the “Bairros Saudáveis” case
The “Bairros Saudáveis” (Healthy Neighborhoods) programme in Portugal emerged in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Its aim was to improve health conditions and quality of life in vulnerable territories through small, bottom-up interventions. A key condition for these interventions was the formation of partnerships between associations, NGOs, residents, and public entities. This article examines the relationships between the quality of spaces in vulnerable territories and participatory and/or bottom-up public policies, using “Bairros Saudáveis” (BS) as a case study. The research involves a selection of projects developed within the BS programme, combining information obtained from interviews with individuals and entities involved in these projects and analysing official project documents. The objectives of the study are to contextualize and understand the BS programme within the social and public health crises it coincided with; examine how the themes of “space” and “architecture” were addressed by the programme and its proposed projects; verify the programme’s adherence to participatory principles; and identify good practices for future similar actions or new editions of the programme. Additionally, this study aims to contribute to a broader reflection on the state of participatory practices in architecture within the Portuguese context. It seeks to understand whether these practices are helping to mitigate socio-economic-cultural problems and improve the quality of life in marginalized contexts. Methodologically, the paper explores the official communication channels of the BS programme; key primary and secondary sources related to the theme; interviews with actors involved in the selected case studies, as well as privileged observers; and in situ participatory observation. We acknowledge the challenge of identifying concrete outcomes from an unfinished public policy, as some projects remain incomplete. Therefore, we present this as a work in progress, aimed at promoting relevant and necessary debate both within and outside the academic sphere. In conclusion, this study highlights numerous deficiencies in many Portuguese housing contexts, whether geographically peripheral or socially excluded in urban centres. The pandemic exacerbated social and territorial inequality in Portugal, leading to problems that directly impact the quality of life for marginalised populations. The cases analysed also underscore the potential of architecture and spatial interventions as strategies for social transformation. Cover image: Balneários Comunitários. Photo: Os Pioneiros, 2022. Courtesy of Os Pioneiros.
Derechos de autor 2025 Leonardo Ramires, Rita Ochoa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Revitalizing housing: the vital trajectories of cooperative systems
In a present time of crisis. Disruptive, turbulent and problematic (Haraway 2022), cooperative housing have re-emerged as a resilient network. These dynamic systems came to challenge prevailing narratives about housing and city production, offering alternatives through an innovative social technology. These cooperative systems become authentic collaborative and supportive cells of habitat generation, thus forming a complex assemblage of multiple entities. This essay invites to think about the vital and cyclical nature of housing cooperatives, by observing the phenomenon as an open system capable of establishing complex relationships that transcend the built object, towards giving value to the role of self-management and self construction played by the community. The Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives developed in Uruguay since 1968 is an example of comprehensive and sustainable solutions to the country’s housing needs. Supported by the National Housing Law of 1968, these cooperatives have established an alternative system that integrates environmental relationships and strengthens cross-sector collaboration between the community and the State. The concept of vitality in cooperativism, which this essay addresses, aligns with the organic and biological approaches to perception and world-building proposed by authors such as John Turner, Donella Meadows and Donna Haraway. The present article consolidates the importance of collective ownership in these cooperatives as both a mechanism of safeguard against real estate speculation and a symbol of popular resistance. Furthermore, it underlines the relevance of community practices and active participation in the construction and management of housing as essential pillars for sustaining the vitality construction of the system. Own Author. 2023. UFAMA Cooperative under construction. Cooperatives of Afro-descendant women heads of households
Derechos de autor 2025 Luisa Frigolett https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This research uses film, photography and projection to analyse the changing space of Northern Sweden (Norrland). This peripheral region is one of the most rapidly reconfiguring spaces in Europe, with on-going programmes of corporate and state investment to exploit space and natural resources for settlement and extraction. The images are part of an archive of the moving of buildings, a common practice in the region. Buildings are moved in relation to changing environmental conditions and now urban land values and global property speculation. It is understood to be a distinct process of what David Harvey has described as “remaking capitalism’s geography”1 Images analyse the material conditions, ideology and power in this frontier economy. The project considers an architecture of de-growth2, challenging ideas of the expanding urbanisation of Norrland. As land values and modes of occupation change, buildings are displaced from the urban centre to increase occupation density through speculative investment. This process displaces social space and previous land formations. The city of Kiruna has been entirely displaced by expanding mine workings. The practice of relocation also has the capacity to shift large-scale historic architectures, as a distinct form of caretaking. In this moment of new waves of investment in mining and forestry, of urbanisation of parts of the region, predicated on an underlying and largely uncontested agenda of ‘development’, the archive offers other conceptions of space and architectural production. The images consider the wrenching of a house from its location and moving it to another location, documenting this process of detachment. It records the re-arrangements of space between land and building. Displacement is illuminated through projections to unsettle, by superimposing architectures onto previous conditions. Keywords: Unsettling, de-growth, relocation, house-moving, displacement. Cover image: Robin Serjeant, “Midwinter projection inside the house.”, Degernäs, December 2021, Film stills
Derechos de autor 2024 Tonia Carless, Robin Serjeant https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Walking the Table: Caring-with landscape
Walking the Table is an experimental project that develops a relationship of care, registering and becoming conscious of subtle changes within an Australian landscape. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s ideas of ‘making-with’1 and Tim Ingold’s concept of ‘thinking through making’2 this visual essay explores ideas of relational care within a rapidly altering landscape and how one may become an attentive participant, moving with a changing landscape as a practice of care. Understanding ‘landscape’ to be a layered entanglement of systems, materials and inhabitants (more-than-human and human) movements and projections that are influenced by the past and present, the role of the photographs and two forms of text is to weave three different layers of conversation that are relational and form an overall narrative. Photography is used to capture the process of a dialogue emerging between the walker and the landscape, facilitated through the camera and the table when walking the table around the site. Landscape and care is an ever-evolving relationship that requires attentiveness and participation. When a relationship with a landscape is built over a prolonged period of time, revealed are the drastic differences in scales of temporal shifts that landscapes undergo, formulating an ongoing dialogue between the landscape and the inhabitant of that landscape. Cover image: Shadow 11, Noticing an unusual shadow of a tree branch I looked up. What we humans botanically classify as an Ulmus species had a strange growth on its smaller branches. Unknown to me whether the tree has wing-bark disease or is a cork-winged Elm, after this discovery and unsure whether the Elm was sick or not, each time I passed by, I would check on the tree.
Derechos de autor 2023 Millicent Gunner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Dams in the Swiss Alps are at once engineering marvels, dramatic man-made artefacts, crucial nodes in far-reaching infrastructural systems, and destructive interventions in alpine ecosystems. The essay explores the contradictory nature of dams in the Swiss Alps through the author’s photographs and the experience of the infrastructural sublime. By focusing on the coming together of rockface and cast concrete shell within the images, the dams appear as distinct naturecultures interwoven with the flows and forces of the alpine landscape. Using the sublime as a lens to describe the aesthetic experience, the essay proposes the possibility of gaining environmental consciousness and humility of the vast impact of dams, through the encounter of the infrastructural sublime. Cover image: Lars Rolfsted Mortensen, Dixence I from the series “Infra/Super/Structure”, 2017, 128 x 160cm inkjet print
Derechos de autor 2023 Lars Rolfsted Mortensen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The essay investigates the Milanese street-front gardens of post-WWII middle-class housing. Spread around the city by hectic developers, these gardens reflect specific cultural- al, political and social conditions of Italy’s industrial capital during the economic miracle. Street-facing gardens are an essential feature of modern middle-class condominiums. They reflected the modernist urban vision of a park-city and the Milanese tradition of the street facade; they encapsulate the bourgeois culture with its urge for representative decorum and the freedom of architectural experimentation; their image was used as a marketing tool in real estate advertisement but also as an argument in negotiation for the building licence. In Post-WWII Milan urban nature radically changed its connotation: from a hygienic device, it transformed into a status symbol, and the Milanese started to take care of gardens precisely because of their decorative importance. Even though they are private, they are designed to be looked at from the street, and therefore they make an important part of the everyday urban experience. Beyond their speculative nature, the gardens of Milanese condominiums transformed the urban landscape, bringing density together with well-cared nature into the city streets. The essay explores this phenomenon through a series of distant and close-up views as if following a wandering gaze through the streets of the city. Cover image: Condominium in Piazzale Bacone, arch. Gustavo and Vito Latis, 1968
Derechos de autor 2023 Natalia Voroshilova, Giulio Galasso https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Food production is the largest cause of global environmental change. The debate on sustainable agriculture focuses largely on the implementation of new agricultural techniques. The impact of these techniques on agricultural landscapes is not often considered. With the film ‘Tussen de kassen’, I attempt to shift the current debate in a direction that allows consideration of the aesthetic and systemic consequences of the implementation of agricultural techniques on specific landscapes. ‘Tussen de kassen’ examines an innovative and sustainable landscape of greenhouse horticulture. More than a tool to communicate research or annotate site visits, film and filmmaking functioned as architectural carpentry. Meaning that the complete process of filmmaking (including preliminary site visits, editing, etc.) functioned as an unconventional method of knowledge production for an architectural research project. Using ‘Tussen de Kassen’, I illustrate three ways in which filmmaking as architectural carpentry benefits the work of landscape architects whilst examining modern landscapes of food production; As a tool to explore and examine the atmospheres of agricultural landscapes (1) Film is able to convey synaesthetic properties of a landscape. These are properties that belong to multiple sensory fields at once and play a part in generating ‘atmosphere’, the meaning a person assigns unconsciously and almost instantaneously to a space. Film allows viewers to explore the synaesthetic properties behind this initial atmosphere and (re-) examine their subconsciously assigned meanings to space. As a method to explore unexpected entanglements in food production landscapes (2) The (architectural) medium used to analyse a site determines the understanding of that site. Filmmaking demands close engagement with a site, making the filmmaker a participant of the landscape. This results in unexpected discoveries of entanglements between agricultural techniques and other site aspects. As a form of eidetic storytelling for landscapes of the Anthropocene (3) Narrating the functioning and conception of Anthropocenic landscapes in a causal, linear manner is problematic as it leads to ‘undecidability’ and inaction. Film, as an eidetic storytelling tool, combines different types of information (i.e. visual, acoustic, quantifiable, metaphoric, etc.) to mediate multivalent, openended and non-linear narratives for Anthropocenic landscapes. Cover image: Stills from ‘Tussen de Kassen’
Derechos de autor 2023 Corné Strootman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
White buildings, Red Dust: Brasilia in Ektachrome Colour
Brasília’s red dust is everywhere. Regularly tinting the white surfaces of Brasília’s modernist buildings red, a great effort of human labor is required every day to maintain their intended autonomy. Dust clouds first appeared in February 1957 due to massive earthworks and the clearing of the original landscape. While large tractors and caterpillars aggressively manipulated the ground following the forms of Lucio Costa’s Pilot Plan, a formless entropic dispersal of red soil microparticles filled the air. As the floating dust spread over Brasília’s construction site, it also filled the printed pages of newspapers and magazines. This article intends to discuss how dust tainted the representation of Brasília. As modernist architecture confronted the landscape, dust introduced a distortion in the pure image of Brasília, threatening not only the whiteness of the upcoming architectures but also contaminating drawings, cameras, lenses, printed photographs, clothes and lungs. While most of the architectural black and white photos of Brasília tended to produce clean images, the introduction of the newest color film Ektachrome by photojournalists made earthworks and dust visible. Associated with grainy reproduction in illustrated magazines and speckles of dust in the negatives themselves, the images enhanced the perception of Brasília’s total environmental design. If dust is, according to Richard Meyer, “an environment in miniature, a physical archive of our material surroundings,” this article analyzes how these fine particles of solid matter and their accidental reproduction, operated as visual dissonances that confuse the modern distinction between nature and culture. Cover image: Mário Fontenelle, Clearing, c.a. 1958, Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal
Derechos de autor 2023 Ciro Miguel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Foz Velha: The creation of an image of permanencies and transformations
The present proposal uses the television documentary Foz Velha (1975)1, from the series As Pedras e o Homem (1973-1976), produced by RTP (Rádiotelevisão Portuguesa2), as a means to understand the image that is linked to the territory of Foz Velha, in Foz do Douro (Porto). Aware of RTP’s will to promote culture and its ability to condition the viewer’s perception of a certain theme, object or space, we intend to analyse this phenomenon at Foz Velha in the aforementioned documentary, to which contribute the script, the selected shots, and the chosen soundtrack. This intermediality helps determining the sensorial and affective experience of the space. It is noteworthy that the study of this urban area has been focused on the architectural and urbanistic characterization that occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, associated with the character of villeggiatura inherent to Foz, lacking a holistic view of the transformations that occurred from the second half of the twentieth century and the perception that is being linked to it. In this sense, the documentary will be analysed through the identification of the places filmed and the survey of associated architectural, urban and social characteristics, as these are pointed out both visually and discursively throughout the documentary, as well as considerations, which are made regarding what is considered to be authentic as opposed to contemporary practices. The existing heterogeneity of Foz Velha will also be characterised through the examination of existing typologies, the materials used, and the ornamental elements of the façades, as well as the size of the plots and urban transformations, displayed at different moments in the documentary. In this way, relationships can be established with the different moments of paradigm change in Foz. With the association of Foz Velha with the idea of an old town, marked by a devout community, with strong links to fishing practices, living a simple and serene domestic life, the documentary makes it possible to trace the profile of the area under study in the 1970s-80s, a period marked by radical urban change, understanding the buildings existing at the time and identifying typologies, materials and elements used. Through comparison with the present day, it is also possible to assess subsequent constructions and interventions in the buildings. The research also allows us to understand the perception of contemporary buildings as a poor quality architectural conception that de-characterizes the territory, justifying that «it is hurting the harmony of Foz Velha with awful buildings that mean nothing and care little or nothing to conserve the trait of local architecture»3 [00:12:43 - 00:12:58]. Cover image: Visual contrasts in Foz Velha, 1975 (Source: Arquivo RTP. Caria, José, dir. As Pedras e o Homem: Foz Velha [documentary, digital]. Portugal: RTP, 1975, 00:13:50)
Derechos de autor 2023 João Gadelho Novais Tavares https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Unclaiming the natural waterfront landscape: Thessaloniki’s manmade east waterfront
This article focuses on the transition of the natural landscape of Thessaloniki’s east waterfront to the artificial urban landscape that draws a straight line between water and land, while noting the developing rigid homogeneous multistorey buildings as a background image of the city in contrast to the former porosity and architectural variety of the late 19th-early 20th century mansions. The transition is captured either as a commentary on the new landscape or as a memoir of a lost era by cinematographers, such as Takis Kanellopoulos in his film “Parenthesis” (1968) and Theo Angelopoulos in his film “Eternity and a Day” (1998) and photographers of the 1960’s such as Socratis Iordanidis and Yiannis Stylianou. Cover image: Theo Angelopoulos, Populated manmade waterfront, Film still, Eternity and a Day, Thessaloniki, 1998
Derechos de autor 2023 Sotiria Alexiadou, Vassilis Colonas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This paper concerns the cinematic representation of São Paulo’s Elevado João Goulart, a 3.5km elevated expressway close to the historic centre of the city, popularly known as the Minhocão. Built during the boom period of Brazil’s dictatorship, the Minhocão opened to traffic in January 1971. Controversial at the beginning of its existence, it has been partially rehabilitated, a process in which film has been important. The paper describes three general modes of the Minhocão’s depiction on film: in the first it represents a generalised fear of the modern city, in the second it is a normal part of the landscape, and in the third it is a form of aesthetic occupation. Key films discussed include Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), directed by Hector Babenco (1985) and the documentary Elevado 3.5 (Maíra Bühler, Paulo Pastorelo and João Sodré 2006). The paper responds to Sophia’s Landscapes of Care theme by showing how over time film can, over time, help rehabilitate seemingly irredeemable infrastructure.
Derechos de autor 2023 Richard Williams https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The essay ‘Other Interpretations on Tower H’ is the result of a keen interest in exploring the multiple interpretative possibilities concerning a specific abandoned residential building in Rio’s Barra da Tijuca district. Tower H was part of modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer’s ‘Centro da Barra’ project (1969), developed in this up-and-coming neighbourhood at that time. The research for this text began in 2021, while the tower was under structural inspection. As a result of it, I identified ‘ambiguous’ and ‘open’ aspects of the building that relate to Ignasi de Solà- Morales’ terrain vague concept. The recent demolition of the tower’s sealing surface and the subsequent excavation of a landfilled area next to the tower have changed the city’s perception and memory fluxes of the building: from the past to the present; from closed to exposed interiors; from covered to excavated landfilled sand that was buried since the tower construction. All of this brings back memories of the neighbourhood’s landscape not only during the presence of this imposing building but also prior to its existence. A photographic experiment promoted a tactical experience inside this enigmatic architectural object. Additionally, it analysed displacement operations from the last two years, allowing new interpretations on this landmark.
Derechos de autor 2023 Julia Maria Fabbriani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Ways of seeing architecture and landscape in the voids of presence
The article examines the multi-layered roles of photography and film in “cultural translation,” representing architecture and landscape as a mediated place of conflicting visions, meanings and experiences. Taking the concept of the “production of space” as a starting point, it aims to contextualise the mediatory practices of photography and film by means of analysing the case study of a multifunctional building – the Krvavica Children’s Health Resort – designed in the 1960s by Rikard Marasović on the Adriatic coast of Croatia (formerly Yugoslavia). Focusing on an analysis of three paradigmatic examples of visual practices, the photographic series by Wolfgang Thaler (2011), the episode Mysterious Object in the Pine Forest filmed as part of the documentary series Slumbering Concrete (2016), and the experimental film A Record of Landscape without Prehistory by the artistic duo Doplgenger (2020), the article explores how photography and film communicate quality, in particular how mediated representations (re)create current interpretation and understanding of the intertwined heritage of modern architecture and landscape. Examining aspects of recording the site from different perspectives, a series of questions arise when addressing the issue of space, focused on its role in reshaping meanings, memories, emotions and experiences, narrating not only what architecture and landscape are but also what they could become and how they might be constituted in the context of different cultural identities.
Derechos de autor 2023 Jasna Galjer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
There is a big gap between the abstraction of an idea and its concrete implementation. This gap is filled with processes that imply the taking of actions to help achieve a tangible result, and there is a myriad of ways these actions can follow through. Photographic and filmic methodologies shape work through the processes of doing informed by gestures in the photographic and filmic operations on site and in the later editing phase1 by which an understanding is changed into a story, an idea in a final visual and/or sequential form. The need for good ideas due to the growing challenges presented by climate changes, imposes serious thinking around actual ways of doing relevant contributions to help ‘heal a broken world’. Photographic and filmic work processes can support that purpose embedding specific site experience methodologies open to the passage of time and the changes it encompasses associated with the landscape we have inherited. Exploring a place or a landscape and working with what is found through movement: walking, driving, flying, the editing of footage, the study of photographs, films, or selected material, reveal changes to specific landscapes and possible readings, interpretations, and understandings of those changes. Such actions and processes have a long tradition in artistic practices transecting land art, landscape architecture and environmental studies.2 (...)
Derechos de autor 2023 João Leal, Rikke Munck Petersen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0