The fortune of the city is that it has never been perfect

Lately we’ve been returning to the idea that imperfection is an essential urban condition. As the physical and organizational structure of communal life, the city is necessarily incomplete and must adapt to changes in society. Otherwise, it becomes a lifeless monument. And while working on the exhibition that opens this week at the CCA, we wondered why is it, then, that the design and transformation of this evolving organism is traditionally dealt with by two distinct disciplines that are only able to see the city partially: those of urbanism or planning on one hand, and architecture  on the other. An urban plan needs architecture to materialize, and the buildings and open spaces that make up a city and meet its residents’ more immediate needs must respond and refer to an urban skeleton. The city and its constituent communities flourish in environments shaped by the productive dialogue between the two disciplines and their integration into a more unified way of thinking about how spaces are inhabited and experienced.

Álvaro Siza, whose archive is the main object of investigation in our exhibition The fortune of the city is that it has never been perfect, is one of the rare figures who has always thought of the city and architecture together as an integrated project. His ideas on the urban, developed from the 1950s to the present, in Porto and across the world, celebrate the city as an imperfect body that constantly demands transformation and in which the existing fabric and new interventions coherently build urban spaces together—an idea deeply embedded in our curiosity about how architecture shapes contemporary life. 

We explored these questions in Siza’s archive at the CCA and in those of a few of his peers like Aldo Rossi or James Stirling. And we also spent time with him in Porto to learn more. Over three days in September 2025, we became familiar with how Siza seeks to determine the right scale of intervening in cities—the right degree of adding something new to them and building within or altering existing frameworks. He proposes that we work in a dialogical way, starting from what and who we encounter in a place and caring for its existing character in the interest of the collective and the individuals who live there. These conversations with Siza provided the framework of the exhibition and will be the focus of an accompanying book (co-published in Portuguese with Circo de Ideias and in English with Ruby Press) to be published later this year. 

For the exhibition design we have worked with adamo-faiden, whose work is precisely interested in developing the relationship between architecture and its surroundings within the contingencies of a site. (They published an illuminating article on our website on a selection of twentieth-century housing projects in Buenos Aires and their contribution to urban life.) Their display concept is both amplified and challenged by the graphic design work of Jonathan Hares, which turns the galleries into a set for collective urban discourse. Material from Siza’s archive at the CCA—including drawings, photo collages, models, and sketchbooks—converses with photographs by Gabriele Basilico, Nuno Cera, Alessandra Chemollo, Giovanni Chiaramonte, and Balthazar Korab.

As we open the exhibition tomorrow at the CCA, May 21, we publish an excerpt on our website of the conversation between Siza and Giovanna Borasi, on his project for Quinta da Malagueira in Évora. Over the next few months, we will continue publishing articles that explore how urbanism thought together with architecture (and vice versa) enables city life. Ultimately, a good city is a project by many authors, a place built through many experiences accumulated over time. We hope you will join us to reflect together on cities and the collective needs of those who live in them. 

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