Farewell to Paolo Portoghesi 

It was precisely that Baroque Rome that had accompanied him in his early years in the Pigna district, in the shadow of Largo Argentina, that would remain a perennial source of inspiration for Portoghesi, as he himself had repeatedly recalled. It would be with the essay 'The Inhibitions of Modern Architecture,' however, published in 1976, that he would become a reference and advocate of postmodernism in Italy.

Elected director of the Venice Biennale in 1979, the following year he would bring to life the installation Strada Novissima, consisting of twenty contiguous facades of different sizes, created by as many internationally renowned architects. An initiative that was regarded as the Italian manifesto of postmodern architecture. His many works include Casa Baldi in Rome, the Montpellier Gardens in Lattes, France, the palace of the Jordanian royal family in Amman, and the mosques in Rome and Strasbourg.

Considerato una mente vivace e sempre in cerca di nuove intuizioni, seppe anticipare anche i temi naturalistici e legati al recupero del rapporto tra uomo e terra

But above all, Casa Papanice, a Roman civic building designed in 1967 together with engineer Vittorio Gigliotti, considered by historians around the world to be one of the symbols of Italian postmodernism. So much so that, on the occasion of Portoghesi's 90th birthday, the facade was projected onto the buildings of culture on four different continents. Considered a lively mind always seeking new insights, he was also able to anticipate naturalistic themes and related to the recovery of the relationship between man and earth.

Indeed, in the last twenty years he devoted his activity to what he called geoarchitecture, calling it a 'humanistic' architecture, in line with Serge Latouche's degrowth theory. In 2005 he published the essay 'Geoarchitecture. Towards an Architecture of Responsibility', also founding the journal 'Inhabiting the Earth'.

In 2007, the chair of Geoarchitecture was activated at La Sapienza Faculty of Architecture, of which he was professor emeritus. According to Portoghesi's explanation, geoarchitecture would have to comply with specific fundamental criteria, including learning from nature, learning from history and protecting natural balances. A subject on which, especially today, Portoghesi would still have had much to teach.