in conversation: pedro gadanho

Photo courtesy Pedro Gadanho.

Pedro Gadanho (born 1968) is an architect, curator, and Loeb Fellow at Harvard University. Previously running his own architectural practice in Porto, in 2012, Gadanho became the curator of contemporary architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he coordinated the Young Architects Program and curated exhibitions such as 9+1 Ways of Being Political, Uneven Growth, and A Japanese Constellation. 

Between 2015 and 2019, he was the founding Director of MAAT, the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology, in Lisbon, curating shows and publications such as Utopia/Dystopia, Tension & Conflict, and Eco-Visionaries. During 2020- 21, he led a bid for European Capital of Culture 2027 by a coalition of 17 cities in Portugal's interior. In 2022, he launched Climax Change! How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency.

LUCIJA ŠUTEJ: Having worked as an architect in Porto - what led to your decision to switch to a curatorial role? 

PEDRO GADANHO: Even as an architecture student, I was more interested in architecture as a cultural expression rather than just production (laugh). Early on, I started organizing different events and concluded exhibitions would be a good means to pursue certain forms of investigation within contemporary architecture. Good examples were two exhibition proposals I developed in 2001. One was for Porto's 2001 European Capital of Culture, proposing to look at architecture produced in the paired city- Rotterdam- and its local architects' different worldviews. The other proposal was for Experimental Design 2001, an exhibition on London-based architects and how the metropolitan spirit influenced their practices' organization, concepts, and themes. 

Initially, I was interested in curation as a form of research to understand cultural expressions of specific architectural practices related to context, setting, place, etc. Other things followed naturally, like the Venice Biennial in 2004, which brought in younger generations of Portuguese architects. 

LŠ: Your blog, Shrapnel Contemporary, looks at different practices that shape our cities. Why did you decide to start your platform, and what were you trying to address that was missing in mainstream architecture publishing?

PG: Writing has always been an essential tool for me. Curating was an expansive form of research to eventually write a concluding text, bringing together insights and discoveries from a specific research process. I mainly wrote through curation projects or commissioned articles in various media, including non-architecture ones. But my blog allowed me to write beyond these commissions - out of a personal need. The reflections were sometimes based on traveling or even the changing circumstances of my interest. As the title indicated, it was a form of bringing political writing into being, freed from media constraints where such critical views could not be expressed - it was a space to exercise writing freely and personally (laugh).

LŠ: Could we also stop at your work on the Centre for Contemporary Urban Culture in Portugal?

PG: The Centre for Contemporary Urban Culture arrived before the blog. The structure proposed the Post-Rotterdam exhibition during Porto 2001, further allowing us to organize events around urban culture. The last large-scale event took place in 2010, in the form of a conference on architecture and fiction at the Gulbenkian Foundation, which originated a book.

On another occasion, for the 2001 Maia Arts Biennial (Porto), we produced a reading of the city from different disciplinary viewpoints, intended as a base material for artists' installations and interventions - establishing an attractive exhibition model. However, once this project was established, I lost interest in repeating it. My ambition as a curator was to avoid repeating work - perhaps because I get bored quickly and need change (laugh).

LŠ: As the Curator of Contemporary Architecture at MoMA, you curated the Uneven Growth exhibition, which focused on six megacities as small projects with a group of architects addressing different local challenges. How do you see its impact on further urban planning and expansion in Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, and Rio de Janeiro?

PG: Uneven Growth built upon MoMA's workshop model of generating exhibition content. My contribution was internationalizing it beyond the US and focusing on inequality in the growing megacities with the design field's potential to address slum growth and urban imbalances. Each city served as a laboratory case, researched by pairings of local and international teams. The resulting proposals emerged from their differing backgrounds and dialogue, sometimes involving friction. For me, it shows how curating involves identifying relevant players and themes, but also enabling innovative thinking through collaboration. 

So, the Hong Kong team's proposal of artificial islands to address housing and density limitations parallels New York's rising sea level challenges. Each city had specific issues, such as its morphology, problems, and possible futures, which were explored through team discussions. New York revealed an invisible map of subdivided immigrant housing, inspiring solutions for augmented informal housing. Istanbul's segregated neighborhoods sparked ideas for apps facilitating service exchanges and community building. The younger Istanbul team's social media savvy and the Paris-based team's interest in urban agriculture yielded novel concepts neither could have reached alone.

Image courtesy of Pedro Gadanho.

LŠ: How do you see museums such as MoMA,  expanding their roles by shaping and guiding new architectural practices through initiatives such as the Young Architects Program?

PG: The Young Architects Program was innovative in identifying emerging talent just out of architecture schools and giving them a platform to build and accelerate their careers. Firms like SHoP gained visibility and grew into major practices through it. Museums can create an impact beyond their walls by sharing content through exhibitions, publications, and media. The Young Architects Program's urban interventions engaged broader audiences beyond just architecture. Still, I've come to believe museums alone are insufficient - curatorial strategies must extend to cities and regions. Bringing curatorial approaches to regional futures is what I'm focused on now.

LŠ: Speaking of shifting curatorial practices- we previously discussed expanding beyond museum borders to the roles of city curators. How do you envision these roles, and how are they more than just - for a lack of better word- “longer-term biennial curators"?

PG: So far, I've only seen one advertisement for a city curator in the city of Hamburg, where the curatorial model is integrated with the municipality to address public space and incorporate artistic interventions informed by city development processes. This engagement with local issues and politics allowed for critical, socially-relevant proposals that generated public discussion. I see potential for such urban and regional curating in European Capitals of Culture, using the event as a catalyst for change. For Guarda's 2027 bid proposal, I envisioned exhibitions and workshops alongside longer-term urban projects to address depopulation and ecological sustainability. Though another city was chosen, I'm continuing this speculative regional planning in an academic context at Harvard, looking at welcoming climate refugees and developing self-sufficiency in a depopulating region in Portugal's interior. So, the project now merges curating, speculative practices, and scenario building.

LŠ: When we first met, we had a fascinating discussion on different regional challenges in Portugal and looked at the role of architecture curation as a way to address and highlight possible solutions. 

PG: I currently live part-time in Covihã, in a severely depopulated region - having lost its industrial textile base without enough economic innovation or dynamism to attract or hold younger populations. Local youth who go to university leave and don't return due to a lack of jobs, leading to an aging and depopulating region. If demographic trends continue, with a 10% population loss every decade, it could lead to total desertification by 2100. It's part of the broader phenomenon of shrinking cities. However, we wanted to view it from the perspective of the ecological emergency as an opportunity, as this is a relatively protected area, somewhat safeguarded from the worst climate impacts happening faster in southern Portugal due to soil erosion. 

This interior area could expectedly welcome climate refugees from northern Africa escaping affected sites, people from coastal areas due to rising sea levels, or others finding it more challenging to manage lives in big cities and seeking a connection to nature and a more balanced lifestyle in a less stressful place. I see these movements converging with the possibility of reversing the depopulation trend. It's a question of long-term urban planning, looking at future scenarios, desired population growth, and implementing urbanistic instruments now to achieve the result in 50 years - a form of long-term, “science fiction" urbanism rather than dealing with small, short-term city developments.

LŠ: In this context, I would love to also stop by your book Climax Change! and specifically its first chapter, titled Stop Building, - almost a statement that seems impossible given how market-driven architecture is. 

PG: Stop Building defended the idea that in areas like Europe or the USA, with stabilized or even declining populations, we should ask what is the sense of still expanding cities onto virgin land and using soil valuable for competing activities like producing food, energy, and biodiversity. The point was that architects, understanding the impacts of new construction, have the responsibility to tell society they should stop building - not stop building altogether but ban taking new lands for development. It's part of an ecological reckoning the profession must have! We must change our practice and start recycling and renovating existing spaces rather than expanding onto virgin land. Post-crisis (2008), we realized that continued expansion was unsustainable. Of course, developing countries are still growing in population and urban footprints, which must be controlled, but societies with stabilized populations should find new models of architectural innovation within adaptive reuse rather than relying on constant expansion.

Covers of Climax Change by Pedro Gadanho. Courtesy ACTAR.

From publication Climax Change: Andrés Jaque, Office for Political Innovation, courtesy of Actar.

Climax Change: Ant Farm FreeMason Conference 1970. Courtesy of ACTAR.

LŠ: Your current lifestyle reflects the essay. 

PG: Yes (laugh)- I saw potential in revisiting the region where I was born and had the opportunity to sell a one-bedroom apartment in Porto to buy a farm for the same value. It is a paradox since a productive farm should be more valuable than an apartment (laugh). I decided to turn that land into an experiment, with some regeneration - planting trees and “curating" landscapes by creating moments with different qualities that could become attractive to visit - though with no clear purpose yet. It implies making the surrounding land eventually self-sufficient in energy and partially in food production. It involves experiments with permaculture, agroecology, and agroforestry - techniques emerging to find a new balance in soil use and landscape management. 

It's about understanding what urban models within planetary urbanization, as Neil Brenner says, could be more ecologically balanced because most current processes are ecologically insane, producing pollution and exhausting resources, leading to collapse.

LŠ: Stopping again at Climax Change! and the part of Thinking Like a Building -it reveals your views on how the architectural field must transform.

PG: Thinking Like a Building comes from the book Thinking Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold, one of the first American ecologists, via the readings of philosopher Steven Vogel. It defends that to understand an ecosystem like a mountain, you must understand how the mountain itself “thinks" - a metaphor for how systems are organized and balanced. 

So Thinking Like a Building means the building must be part of an ecosystem, producing energy and matter flows that connect and integrate into that ecosystem. Philosophically, it is a way to overcome the idea that what humans produce is outside of nature since nature itself has become humanized and troubled. 

If we want the built environment to resist eventual destruction, we must consider it an ecosystem - a natural system. Buildings will integrate into nature but must also become nature as they decay, producing elements that incorporate the ecosystem's natural cycles and services. 

LŠ: You were also the inaugural director of MAAT (The Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology), and I hoped to revisit its impact on Lisbon's art scene. 

PG: As a new museum, MAAT had the chance and resources to produce something impactful in Lisbon. I saw it as an opportunity to bring a distinct focus on architecture, urbanism, and technology rather than just showcasing contemporary art. The program was structured around artists and topics critically reflecting on the built environment, ecology, and social issues. Exhibitions became discursive interventions, like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's explorations of modernity and social experiments. This approach differed from other museums' artist-centric approaches concerned with market legitimation. Unfortunately, after my departure, MAAT's ambitions and investments diminished, becoming more local and less internationally engaged, mirroring Portugal's often insular art scene. Lisbon's institutional landscape currently needs more dynamism, but I hope independent spaces like Hangar or Kunsthalle Lissabon can reinvigorate it.

LŠ: The inaugural MAAT exhibition Utopia/Dystopia questioned the ideal city and the impact of digital culture on urbanism - currently very discussed topics. What insights did you gain from it?

PG: Utopia/Dystopia looked at how artists and architects have grappled with notions of the ideal city, revealing a shift from modernism's utopian aspirations to the emergence of dystopian thinking in recent decades. The increasing prevalence of dystopia in popular and political discourse, fueled by crises like climate change and the rise of populist figures like Trump, suggested we were entering a new phase. The exhibition aimed to understand and learn from this condition to address urban challenges. Some works, like fictional billboards of polluted Beijing sunsets, anticipated themes further developed in Eco-Visionaries. It underscored the urgency of tackling issues like air quality before resorting to virtual simulacra. Dystopian art can serve as a warning and catalyst for change.

All images: “Utopia/Dystopia", MAAT/Photo: Bruno Lopes.

Installation views: “Eco-Visionaries", MAAT/Photo: Bruno Lopes.

LŠ: Lastly, how did MAAT's Aerocene exhibition with Tomás Saraceno open up discussions on speculative urbanism?

PG: Aerocene featured Tomás Saraceno's visionary proposals for floating cities powered by thermodynamic forces like solar energy and wind. These speculative urban structures, inspired by Archigram, envisioned a future of nomadic inhabitation untethered from the Earth's surface in response to climate change. As an architect turned artist, Saraceno uses the art world as a platform for exploring ideas beyond the constraints of conventional practice. Saraceno introduced visitors to his forward-thinking concepts - sparking discussions on the role of speculative architecture in addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene epoch. His work embodies the potential of transdisciplinary thinking to reshape our understanding of cities and sustainability. 

Exhibition views: “Aerocene", MAAT/Photo: Bruno Lopes.