In the East as in the West, the balance between traditional values and innovation has evolved over time,
     in step with the course of history. One must look back centuries to understand this encounter.
     Globalisation, in both material and spiritual terms, is nothing new.
     Portugal, too, was deeply influenced by this rapprochement,
     as early as the advent of intercontinental voyages.
     Álvaro Siza

In 2026, the Siza Talks adopt the theme International Conversations, inviting reflection on architecture as a meeting place between geographies, cultures and ways of building. The global dimension of Álvaro Siza’s work provides a starting point for understanding how architectural practice is transformed through contact with other realities and how this experience reshapes the way we look at places closer to home. Continuing the path of previous editions, the programme opens up a space for dialogue around issues that run through contemporary practice and find particularly sensitive expression in Siza’s work, accompanied by a singular curiosity about the world.
Across both national and international projects, a process of mutual learning unfolds: knowledge acquired in one context is questioned and expanded in another, while encounters with different ways of inhabiting space make it possible to recognise opportunities previously unimagined. Landscape, memory and the concrete conditions of construction all play a part in this process, in which each work emerges from the relationship between the civilisation the architect carries with them and what the place allows them to discover.
As Siza reminds us, the circulation of ideas and methods has a history stretching back centuries, shaped by exchanges and conflicts, transmission and cultural cross-fertilisation. Architecture participates in this movement through travelling drawings, adaptable techniques and knowledge shared through collaborative work. To reflect on its international dimension is therefore also to consider how these encounters are built: the willingness to listen, the recognition of vernacular wisdom, and the ability to reassess one’s own certainties.
Within this perspective, the relationship between centre and periphery becomes a subject of reflection. By recognising that peripheries reveal themselves, successively, as other centres of culture, we are invited to think of identity as a continuously evolving construction, whose roots extend through contact and interdependence. What new understandings of architecture emerge from this encounter? How is an idea translated between different traditions, materials and climates? And how does work carried out abroad transform architectural practice at its point of origin?
International Conversations brings together these questions through the sharing of experiences and the discovery of affinities, exploring what architecture learns when it crosses borders. Conversation here becomes an exercise in attention 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 ways of relating architecture to the world, shaped by distinct generational contexts and individual professional paths. The dialogue between their practices allows us to explore how ideas are transformed when they encounter another country, how construction knowledge is renewed through experimentation, and how each project negotiates the relationship between memory and change. Through the diversity of their approaches, these conversations open up a field of reflection on the responsibility of building in multiple places and on the contribution each case makes to a shared architectural culture.
The Advisory Council of the Architecture Department and the 2026-27 Siza Talks is composed of 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 Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize), Phyllis Lambert (founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture), and historian Kenneth Frampton.
The Siza Talks are organised by the Serralves Foundation in collaboration with the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

PROGRAMME

12 NOVEMBER 2026
19:00 WELCOME
19:30 OPENING LECTURE (to be announced shortly)

13 NOVEMBER 2026
17:00 NUNO MELO SOUSA (Portugal)
18:00 MARIANA SIMAS (Studio MK27, Brazil)
19:00 CAMPO BAEZA (Spain)

14 NOVEMBER 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)