In both East and West, the balance between traditional values and innovation evolved according 

to the flow of History. One needs to go back centuries in order to assess that encounter. 

Globalization does not constitute something new in material and spiritual terms. 

That approach had an enormous influence also in Portugal, 

 as early as the advent of intercontinental travel. 

Álvaro Siza 

In 2026, the Siza Talks takes on International Conversations as its theme, inviting a reflection on architecture as a meeting ground for geographies, cultures and ways of building. The global scope of Álvaro Siza’s oeuvre offers a starting point for understanding how design evolves through contact with other realities, and how this experience renews our perception of places closer to home. In continuity with previous editions, this series opens a dialogue space for the exploration of issues that run through contemporary practice and find a particularly sensitive expression in Siza’s work, accompanied by a unique curiosity for the world. 

Reciprocal learning unfolds across national and international projects: knowledge acquired in one context is questioned and expanded in another, while coming upon different ways of living reveal previously unsuspected possibilities. Landscape, memory and the practical conditions of construction all contribute to this process, in which each design emerges from a relationship between the civilization architects bring with them and what a new place allows them to discover. 

As Siza reminds us, the circulation of ideas and methods has a history stretching back centuries, shaped by approximation and conflict, transmission and transfiguration. Architecture participates in this movement through drawings that travel, techniques that adapt and forms of knowledge brought together through shared work. To consider its international dimension is therefore also to examine how these encounters take shape: the willingness to listen, the recognition of vernacular expertise and the capacity to reconsider one’s own assumptions. 

Within this perspective, the relationship between centre and periphery becomes a subject and by recognising that peripheries continually reveal themselves as other centres for culture, we’re invited to understand identity as a constantly evolving construction, whose roots extend through contact and interdependence. What new understandings of architecture emerge from this confrontation? How is an idea translated across distinct traditions, materials and climates? And how does working abroad transform one’s practice at home? 

International Conversations bring these questions together in the form of shared experiences and the discovery of affinities, setting out to explore what architecture gains as it crosses borders. Conversation becomes an exercise in attentiveness and imagination, a way of making divergence intelligible and, through it, opening new possibilities for the spaces we inhabit. 

The architects invited to this edition bring different understandings the relationship between architecture and the world, informed by their own generational contexts and individual trajectories. A dialogue between their practices offers an opportunity to explore how ideas develop as they encounter a new country, how building knowhow is renewed through experimentation, and how each project negotiates the relationship between memory and change. Through the diversity of their approaches, these conversations lead toward a reflection on the responsibility of working in other contexts and on the contribution each case makes toward a common architectural culture. 

The Consulting Committee of the Architecture Department and Siza Talks 2026–27 is composed of the architects Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, Farrokh Derakhshani (Director of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture), Carles Muro (Associate Professor of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano), Martha Thorne (former Director of the Pritzker Prize), Phyllis Lambert (founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture) and the historian Kenneth Frampton. 

The Siza Talks are organised by the Serralves Foundation in collaboration with the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. 

PROGRAMME 

12 NOV 2026 

19:00 WELCOME 

19:30 OPENING LECTURE (to be announced) 

13 NOV 2026 

17:00 NUNO MELO SOUSA (Portugal) 

18:00 MARIANA SIMAS (Studio MK27, Brazil) 

19:00 CAMPO BAEZA (Spain) 

14 NOV 2026 

16:00 ELIAS and YOUSEF ANASTAS (AAU ANASTAS, Palestine) 

17:00 ANOUK LEGENDRE (XTU Architectes, France) 

18:00 TONY FRETTON (United Kingdom) 

19:00 CARLOS FACIO (Colectivo c733, Mexico)