Five Aspects of Content in Architecture

An Original Architectural Idea from Ricardo Porro: The Five Aspects of Content

Ricardo Porro, the Cuban-born French architect who worked for Fidel Castro, not only created architectural works that defied categorization but also left a lasting mark at the end of the last century through his teaching and strong intellectual background. This book, which reflects Porro's ideas, was published in French in 1993, coinciding with an exhibition that brought together his works. Orhun Alkan, who was close to Porro, was his student, and knew the master architect very well, translated the book into Turkish. In his preface to the book, Alkan says:

"Ricardo Porro, born in Camagüey in 1925 to a family of Lombardian aristocratic Italians who had settled in Cuba centuries ago, completed his architectural education at Universidad de la Habana in 1949. Porro designed his first project in Havana and, the following year, went to France on a scholarship to begin his postgraduate studies at the Institut d'Urbanisme de Paris. This educational trip to Europe allowed him to encounter European culture and deepen his knowledge not only in architecture but also in visual arts, philosophy, and literature.

For Porro, both as an educator and a designer, the concept of 'content' was of primary importance. For Porro, it was a given that architecture is an art and that art consists of the inseparable unity of form and content. Porro's book, The Five Aspects of Content in Architecture, is based on this main paradigm. Architecture is culture that transforms into spaces to be lived in. Culture, in turn, is everything that surrounds humans and forms their living space. This refers not only to a human's environment but also to their inner world, which is shaped by innate characteristics in interaction with that environment. Symbols come to the forefront here.

According to Porro, especially from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, a globalized modern architectural understanding focused on academicism and various formalistic approaches, rationalism's machines for living, and mercantilism's profit-driven objectives, has desolated the landscape of our cities, filled the world with soulless, lifeless structures, and neglected humans as cultural beings. Those who desolated cities also desolated and dried up their own inner worlds. As an architect, Ricardo Porro aimed to imbue his spaces with the honor of poetry. This book, which explains his understanding of architecture and his approach to architectural design, offers an important perspective and a methodological proposal for the architecture of today as well as the past."