Resumen de The Italian tradition of the practice of design: Alcino Soutinho and the Gulbenkian journey of 1960–1961
Architect Alcino Soutinho’s interest in Italy and its culture developed during his training as an architect, profoundly influencing his design work. This interest led him to participate in the competition to award a scholarship for further training abroad, launched by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. The scholarship allowed him to go to Italy for a year in 1960–1961 to study staging designs in Italian cities’ main museums. In this period, he came into contact with Italian architecture’s prominent personalities, international cultural references, such as Ernesto Nathan Rogers. He visited a series of architectures that introduced him to a design modus operandi that represented a real Italian architecture trend. The result of this journey was a report, which Gulbenkian asked for as evidence of the research, and a series of documents (drawings, writings) that convey a rich experience of suggestions and learning. This paper aims to analyze this experience by reading the archival documents that refer to that journey. Moreover, starting from this reading, we will try to understand how Soutinho’s design poetry was influenced by Italian culture.
