Porto Academy 2022

David Kohn was invited to lead a workshop at the 2022 Porto Academy, an annual international summer school organised by architects Amélia Brandão Costa and Rodrigo Costa Lima. Other course leaders included Jo Taillieu, Salottobuono, Walder Nickisch and Clancy Moore.

The workshop, entitled 'RE-PORTO: Intimacy at Scale,' questioned how large scale urban interventions could make space for intimate human interaction from the scale of a conversation. The opportunity to experience and record local architecture through sketching and to use our bodies to perform architectural events, made for a deliberately 'slow' approach to design.

The studio made a tour of eight seminal buildings by the celebrated Porto architect Alvaro Siza including the rarely visited Casa Luis Figuerido. Workshops helped students develop their sketching so that all had filled books by the end of the workshop. In groups, students then imagined these disparate intimate spaces being gathered in the Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto, the Siza-designed architecture school that hosts the Academy. The architecture of the school is characterised by head-like buildings organised around an outdoor stage. This context became the site for a performance of Siza's other projects and also an opportunity for us to stage our own masked performances. 

View the studio booklet here.