Patrimônio: The Latest Architecture and News

Last October 24th marked the centenary of the birth of Brazilian architect Francisco de Assis Couto Reis (1926–2011), who lived and built most of his work in the city of Salvador, Bahia. Assis Reis, as he was better known, had a career shaped not only by the buildings he designed but also by his urban renewal proposals, his design for the Brazilian Pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan (unbuilt), and the Scale Model of the City of Salvador, landmarked in 2020. His vast and diverse body of work belongs to a specific moment of modern expression in Brazil, when architects of this "second generation" were particularly concerned with adapting to local climatic, geographical, and cultural conditions.

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Over the last decade, Uzbekistan has done what most post-Soviet countries still hesitate to do: it formally included dozens of modernist buildings constructed between 1960 and 1980 on its national cultural heritage list. Among them were the Panoramic Cinema, the Tashkent Circus, and the Palace of Peoples' Friendship—structures that, until just a few years ago, were viewed as routine, recent Soviet architecture lacking heritage status.

This decision, however, points to a challenge shared by almost every heritage system worldwide: how to legally protect architecture that has not yet reached the minimum age—formal or informal—to be considered "historic"?

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There is an ancestral gesture in shaping the earth. Long before architecture was established as a discipline, clay was already shaped by human hands and transformed by fire, turning raw material into domestic utensils and cultural objects. In the history of this craft, ceramic factories marked the transition from manual craftsmanship to mass production, expanding their scale without entirely breaking from their material origins. Scattered across diverse territories, these structures record the relationship between technique, landscape, and time. Over the decades, however, many of them eventually lost their original function, replaced by more advanced technological processes or swallowed up by surrounding urban development, leaving them in an intermediate state between permanence and obsolescence.

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This professional qualification course aims to enable architects and urban planners to work effectively in the conservation of recent heritage, strengthening professional practice in the preservation of architectural, urban, and landscape heritage. In this edition, the course focuses on reinforced concrete construction systems and their application in modern buildings.

The Benedictine Monastery of San Nicolò l’Arena in Catania, Sicily, holds within its stones the echoes of five centuries, shaped by time, varied uses, violent earthquakes, and the blazing force of Mount Etna. Its walls, silent witnesses to history, were molded both by the fire of nature and by human hands. Yet among all the transformations it underwent, none was as profound or poetic as the one led by Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo, starting in 1980. After 30 years of dedicated work, time required to truly understand such a complex and awe-inspiring site, the former monastic residence was reborn as a university, not by force, but through revelation.

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