Journal articles on the topic 'Reyner Banham'

Architectural historian P. Reyner Banham (1922–88) is widely known for his numerous writings on the modern built environment, including the book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). In the BBC television film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (Julian Cooper, 1972), he concretized his earlier insights about the importance of mobility in the Southern California metropolis by employing the proclivity of the cinematic medium to represent movement. While traditional notions of the urban icon commonly understand it as a static monument or landmark, in these two works Banham challenges the suitability of this view to a city as inflected by automobility as Los Angeles and proposes the motorway and the experience of driving as its most characteristic iconic forms.

O livro Los Angeles – a arquitetura de quatro ecologias de Reyner Banham (1922-1988) publicado em 1971 tem sido desde sua primeira edição objeto de muita controvérsia. Há quem veja nele um texto seminal, com muita ascendência sobre arquitetos que se lançaram em análises de outras realidades urbanas a partir daquela década. Mas, sua fortuna crítica inclui também críticas acadêmicas severas e, não raramente, demolidoras. As disputas que se travavam naquele momento, em torno do incontornável exame dos dogmas do Movimento Moderno, estão presentes no livro de forma reflexiva, corajosa e, algumas vezes, provocativa. Porém, passadas quatro décadas é interessante debruçar-se sobre o livro buscando apreciar as suas teses a partir do desenvolvimento das metrópoles contemporâneas, estas que, provavelmente, teriam sido designadas pelo autor como metrópoles capitalistas da quarta era da máquina. O artigo busca salientar também a força e a legitimidade da inovação metodológica que o autor forjou para articular a sua tese e seu objeto – a grande Los Angeles.

This essay reconsiders Reyner Banham's classic study of early twentieth-century architecture and design, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, originally published in 1960. Banham surveyed the architecture, design, and visual arts of the ‘first machine age’, characterized by industrial production and motorized transportation, from a self-consciously thematized perspective within the ‘second machine age’, populated by expendable consumer technologies and images. This revisionist perspective enabled Banham to challenge long-standing myths propagated by the dominant figures of the modern movement. In his polemical emphasis on the contingency and plurality of that which had empirically transpired in first machine age, Banham rejected the reduction of the messy history of the modern movement to the victory of a putative ‘international style’. Banham reasserted the intimate connection of architectural modernism with the avant-garde artistic movements of the 1910s and 20s, emphasizing particularly the most radical ones such as expressionism, futurism, and dadaism.

A current issue in architectural scholarship is the rethinking of the origins of Modernism. As a formative exemplar of early architectural Modernism, Bruno Taut's seminal exhibition pavilion, the Glashaus (1914) [1] is understandably part of this debate. In 1959, Reyner Banham in his article, ‘The Glass Paradise’ suggested that it would be appropriate to investigate the origins of the Glashaus, as it was both vastly dissimilar to and exceeded any of Taut's previous designs. In an effort to answer this question, Banham subsequently introduced the unique role played by the Bohemian poet Paul Scheerbart in the design of the Glashaus. As a result of Banham's inference, Rosemarie Haag Bletter systematically explored the Taut/Scheerbart relationship in ‘Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart's Vision: Utopian Aspects of German Expressionist Architecture’ in 1973.

Este artigo buscará analisar as categorias Megaforma, de Kenneth Frampton, e Megaestrutura, de Reyner Banham, situando-as a partir da abordagem teórica de cada um desses historiadores da arquitetura. Entendemos como fundamental a leitura crítica e historicamente situada dessas categorias, tratando-as em relação a outros conceitos aos quais estas se referem, como as ideias de lugar e território , de modo a trazer a tona também os aspectos de dimensão política implicados em ambos os casos. A pertinência desses termos nas leituras historiográficas da arquitetura brasileira aparecerá também como importante objeto de reflexão.

In 1959 Reyner Banham challenged zoned urbanism by combining the Situationist psychogeographic drift with his love for Los Angeles. His essay “City as Scrambled Egg” (Banham, 1959) effectively produced a new urban image and introduced a new outlook on postwar modernization, communication, and leisure. The radicalization of contemporary life resonated in images of the city as decentralized, free, and in motion. While Le Corbusier had compared the city to an egg with demarcating zones and boundaries, Banham argued that motorization and telecommunications had long scrambled the city; “I don’t just mean in Los Angeles. A large part of the population of Europe already lives conurbatively” (Banham, 1959, p. 21). The entire region between Amsterdam and Rotterdam was already one conurbanized arena, effectively formulating an early definition of the megalopolis.Unlike CIAM’s city of the urban core with designated outskirts, thecenter was now seen to be everywhere. For Banham, this was theterrain of contemporary urbanization that needed to be understoodby holding prejudgments at bay and instead doing, what he called,“leg-work on the territory” (Banham, 1959, p. 21). But, as his ongoing fascinations with Futurism and post-war technologies revealed, this departure from modernist imagery of the city was not a disregard of modernist urban utopias but a way to rework these ideas towards a new kind of visionary; one that is less about forecasting the new and, instead, is contingent on a new optical vision of the existing city. A key site for his development of a different way of seeing the modernized urban world was the city of Los Angeles and particularly its traffic, which he called “Autopia.”

La exposición Festival of Britain de Londres de 1951 ocupa un destacado lugar en la historia de la arquitectura inglesa de la postguerra por ser el punto de arranque de la recuperación urbana del South Bank de Londres. Tuvo un gran apoyo y protagonismo en The Architectural Review, que publicó varios artículos y un número monográfico con el fin de mostrar como el master plan de la exposición se ajustaba a los ideales del Visual Planning y del Townscape que la revista venía difundiendo desde hacía unos años. Pero también fue criticada por un grupo de jóvenes arquitectos liderados por Reyner Banham que como reacción propondrían una arquitectura alternativa que fue denominada como el New Brutalism.

Abordamos aqui a obra do influente e controvertido arquiteto Vilanova Artigas, ativo em São Paulo entre as décadas de 1940 e 1970, como obra de arte autônoma, pois esta mostra um uso figurativo de estruturas trilíticas de concreto armado, o qual operava uma fusão da linearidade dos membros com a criação volumétrica no mesmo material. Seus projetos mostravam, por um lado, uma disposição volumétrica e estrutural serial ao longo de um eixo e, por outro, a alternância no percurso do observador entre massa cerrada e espaço, entre luzes intensas e sombras profundas, entre peso e resistência, contrastes estes que a tradição atribui ao sublime arquitetônico, à visão do drama humano do trabalho que, afinal, ergue as estruturas além da medida razoável da utilidade. Exceder esta medida põe a obra em conflito com o marxismo do militante Artigas, mas também a põe no terreno da arquitetura moderna enquanto “estilo da modernidade”, em conflito, segundo Reyner Banham (1970, p.327), com o desenvolvimento ininterrupto da técnica com a qual pretendia legitimar-se.

The relationship between spectators, performers and spaces is investigated in a critical perspective which aims at further developing the concept of the city as a performance place where precarious urban identities are dynamically and temporarily shaped and reshaped. Even if this essay takes into due account the seminal studies of Barthes (1971), H. Lefebvre (1974), and urban theorists such as Reyner Banham and Kevin Lynch who conceived of the city as a ‘legible’ text, at the same time it argues that textuality and performativity must be perceived as intertwined cultural practices that work together to shape the body of phenomenal, intellectual, psychic, and social encounters that frame a subject’s experience of the city. London 2012 Olympic Games, and in particular the stunning Opening Ceremony directed by Danny Boyle, for which visitors and overseas spectators were invited to transform themselves into a global theatrical audience, can be used as a privileged viewpoint from which to analyse the different ways of perceiving, but also being looked at and performing oneself, in and through spaces which tend at modifying, or at interrogating or destabilizing one’s traditional identity.

In 1946 J. M. Richards, editor of theArchitectural Review (AR)and self-proclaimed champion of modernism, published a book entitledThe Castles on the Ground(Fig. 1). This book, written while working for the Ministry of Information (Mol) in Cairo during the war, was a study of British suburban architecture and contained long, romantic descriptions of the suburban house and garden. Richards described the suburb as a place in which ‘everything is in its place’ and where ‘the abruptness, the barbarities of the world are far away’. For this reasonThe Castles on the Groundis most often remembered as a retreat from pre-war modernism, into nostalgia for mock-Tudor houses and privet hedges. The writer and critic Reyner Banham, who worked with Richards at the AR in the 1950s, described the book as a ‘blank betrayal of everything that Modern Architecture was supposed to stand for’. More recently, however, it has been rediscovered and reassessed for its contribution to mid-twentieth-century debates about the relationship between modern architects and the British public. These reassessments get closer to Richards’s original aim for the book. He was not concerned with the style of suburban architecture for its own sake, but with the question of why the style was so popular and what it meant for the role of modern architects in Britain and their relationship to the ‘man in the street’.

In The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Reyner Banham presents a parable in which, having come across an amount of wood, a nomadic tribe must decide how to use it to keep warm overnight: build a structure or build a fire (and burn the wood as fuel). The first of these uses the materials directly to create an amenable interior condition using the tangible materiality of geometric construction. The second, however, generates heat from combustion, thereby creating an intangible, graduated, thermal interiority, which one can draw deeper into, by moving closer to the fire, or recede from, by moving away. Interior architecture has largely been concerned with achieving shelter and creating an interior atmosphere through the dependability and predictability of physical materials. Less often has interior architecture considered the interiority achieved through the temporal contingency of atmospheric quasi-materials (taking a cue from Tonino Griffero’s quasithings), phenomena such as light, sound, temperature, and humidity. While these often strike one as outside of the realm of designers, their effects profoundly colour our experiences of our environments: the smells of street food, the heat of the metro air exhaust, the veil of fog rolling in. A selection of student projects probing quasi-materials in interior architecture reveals their nature and potential for making interior environments. More akin to building a fire than fitting out a shell, these projects question existing tenets of interior architecture, while they enable types of interiority that are fluid, graduated and temporal.

O argumento do presente texto defende que o “Novo Brutalismo”, sendo indiscutivelmente um debate arquitetónico de origem britânica, era movido por um princípio universal: a adesão intelectual aos problemas do seu tempo. A luta contra o academicismo e o historicismo, a aceitação da realidade e das diferentes formas de cada cultura construir o seu habitat, e a crescente importância atribuída aos utilizadores da arquitetura, constituem pontos essenciais para a revisão dos modelos arquitetónicos levada a cabo no pós-guerra. Estes princípios despertam o interesse de uma nova geração de arquitetos portugueses cada vez mais crítica e atenta ao debate internacional, que os assimila por coincidência de interesses, mais do que por conexão ou influência direta. A metodologia adotada passa por recuperar alguns argumentos dos textos de 1955 e de 1966 do crítico Reyner Banham, o principal ideólogo do Novo Brutalismo, com particular incidência nas propostas dos arquitetos Alison e Peter Smithson e o seu papel no grupo Team 10. Após se introduzirem as origens e o contexto do debate, esboça-se o panorama da situação portuguesa nesses anos, com especial incidência na difusão da “novíssima” geração de arquitetos (sensivelmente, os nascidos entre finais de 1920 e inícios de 1930) por iniciativa da revista Arquitectura. Finalmente, apresentam-se os argumentos de dois representantes dessa geração —Nuno Portas e Pedro Vieira de Almeida— cuja relação com o brutalismo não reside em questões estéticas, de forma ou de tratamento das superfícies, mas sim em questões éticas, ou seja, de compromisso com a “utilidade social da arquitetura”. Num primeiro momento, expõe-se um debate em torno à habitação coletiva centrado em métodos e posições críticas, que se complementa num segundo momento com uma breve abordagem a uma obra de arquitetura na qual ambos têm responsabilidade. The argument of the present text argues that the "New Brutalism", being arguably an architectural debate of British origin, was driven by a universal principle: the intellectual adherence to the problems of its time. The struggle against academicism and historicism, the acceptance of reality and the different ways each culture builds its habitat, and the growing importance given to the users of architecture, are essential points for the post-war revision of architectural models. These principles have awakened the interest of a new generation of Portuguese architects that is increasingly critical and attentive to the international debate, assimilating them through coincidence of interests, rather than through direct connection or influence. The methodology adopted involves recovering some arguments from the 1955 and 1966 texts of the critic Reyner Banham, the main ideologue of New Brutalism, with particular focus on the proposals of the architects Alison and Peter Smithson and their role in the Team 10 group. After introducing the origins and context of the debate, the panorama of the Portuguese situation in those years is outlined, with special focus on the diffusion of the "brand new" generation of architects (roughly those born between the late 1920s and early 1930s) through the initiative of the magazine Arquitectura. Finally, we present the arguments of two representatives of this generation -Nuno Portas and Pedro Vieira de Almeida- whose relationship with brutalism does not lie in aesthetic questions, of form or surface treatment, but in ethical questions, i.e., their commitment to the "social utility of architecture. In a first moment, a debate around collective housing centered on methods and critical positions is exposed, which is complemented in a second moment with a brief approach to a work of architecture in which both have responsibility.

Durante buena parte del siglo XX, Los Ángeles fue para muchos el prototipo de ciudad del futuro, de un futuro inmediato: un gigantesco sistema de infraestructuras territoriales; una ciudad pensada por y para el transporte, construida desde la escala del automóvil. Pero también una superciudad forjada por las fantasías de generaciones de inmigrantes que llegaban a California con la promesa de una vida mejor, una ilusión que alentaban sus dos principales industrias: la de la especulación inmobiliaria y la de los sueños de Hollywood. Su imaginario se nutre de todas las visiones que ella misma proyecta, miradas que se debaten entre la seducción utópica del paraíso y el horror distópico y a las que han contribuido escritores, cineastas, críticos y tantos y tantos personajes mediáticos. Probablemente, una de las visiones más seductoras sea la de Reyner Banham quien, en su afán por intentar explicarla como ciudad, terminó contribuyendo decisivamente al mito de Los Ángeles. Ante la dificultad material de visitar físicamente la ciudad, la posibilidad de descubrir Los Ángeles mediante un viaje imaginario guiado por Banham es el punto de partida de este TFG. El trabajo que se explica a continuación consiste, pues, en una aproximación a Los Ángeles desde la distancia, tomando la figura de Reyner Banham y, por supuesto, su libro Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, como guías para este viaje imaginario. En definitiva, no se trataría tanto de un trabajo de crítica de su teoría urbana sino, más bien, de una personal exploración de la complejidad de esta metrópolis mediante el análisis de un fragmento de la misma. Concretamente, de Wilshire Boulevard, una de las calles más representativas de la ciudad y que este trabajo recorre a través de su historia, la visión que el cine nos ofrece del célebre bulevar y, por supuesto, de la propia imaginación de esta autora.

Entre 1978 y 1979, Norman y Wendy Foster proyectan su propia vivienda en el barrio londinense de Hampstead. El proyecto más personal de los Foster permite —como en tantos otros casos— rastrear los referentes, obsesiones, sueños y frustraciones de sus autores.Este proyecto representa el primer y único intento de aplicación en el campo de la arquitectura doméstica de un modelo, denominado por Reyner Banham “la nave bien servida”, que utiliza la integración de sistemas como principal estrategia proyectual.Los 18 meses de intenso trabajo reflejan, a través de las múltiples opciones desarrolladas, la evolución de la obra de la pareja de arquitectos, que avanza desde el funcionalismo fabril de la “nave bien servida”, hacia el expresionismo tecnológico del denominado High-Tech.En los motivos del fracaso del proyecto, que no llegaría a construirse, subyacen los debates y conflictos —entre arquitectura e ingeniería, prefabricación y artesanía, expresionismo y funcionalismo— en los que el estudio se encuentra inmerso a finales de los años 70, y que precipitarán una nueva forma de entender la relación entre arquitectura y tecnología.

Historic-Archaeological Research of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milano on the Indus Delta (2010-2018). The following text is only an abridged note on the excavations at Banbhore and some significant extra-moenia surveys carried out by the Italian Team within the Institutional framework of a “Pak-French-Italian Historical and Archaeological Research at Banbhore” on the basis of a Licence issued by the competent Pakistani Authorities (2010-2015 - Coordinator of the Project Dr Kaleemullah Lashari), and, some later, within a new institutional asset: a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) signed in the 2017 between the Director General of the Department of Antiquities of Sindh (Manzoor A. Kanasro) and the Magnifico Rettore of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan (Prof. Franco Anelli). Aims of the said MoU are: (a) historical-archaeological research-work at Banbhore and Rani Kot; (b) training (theoretical and on the job) to selected students and officers of the DAS. The Italian group works under the sponsorship of the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs (now Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation/MAECI). Scientific director for the Italian Team is Prof. Valeria Piacentini, member of the Board of Directors of the Research Centre CRiSSMA of the Catholic University. In the following dissertation I won’t linger on the debated issue about the identification of the site of Banbhore with historic sites on the Indus delta (the historical Mihrān river) mentioned and described in the written sources of the past. Too many respected scholars and archaeologists have entered this debate since the end of the 19th Century, for which I refer to a well-known exhaustive literature. In the “50s of the previous century, Leslie Alckok – then official to the Department of Archaeology of Pakistan – carried out some preliminary excavations, followed by Dr Rafique Mughal and F.A. Khan. This latter carried out a systematic and extensive archaeological campaign of several years between the “50s and the “60s, well backed by one of the most authoritative Pakistani historians, N.A. Baloch. Khan brought to light extraordinary archaeological and architectural evidence, but, unfortunately, his excavation-notes have gone lost and little or nothing has been published. Thence, our research-work had to start from nothing. First of all and most urgent was an updated planimetric and altimetric study of the site by kite-photos: a massive wall of c. 1,4 km with 55 towers, 7 posterns, and major and secondary accesses to the citadel (2010-2012 by Y. Ubelman, S. Reynard, A. Tilia), regularly updated with advanced technologies (A. Tilia). Then, in collaboration with Dr M. Kervran, head of the French Team, we undertook an accurate study of the bastions and the shapes of its towers (squared, U-shaped, circular), which has brought to envisage three main occupational phases of the intra-moenia area: 1. Indo-Parthian/Indo-Kushan phase (c. III-II Century b.CE – III-IV Century CE); 2. Sasanian/Indo-Sasanian phase (c. III-IV Century – early VIII Century CE); 3. Islamic phase (VIII – XII/early XIII Century CE). Decay and/or abandonment and end of any settled life on the site can be dated around the XII-early XIII Century, due to attacks and pillaging by Turco-Mongol nomadic tribes, and/or the deviation of this branch of the Indus delta and consequent filling of the harbour, or both. Archaeological evidence come to light confirms the historical information. Our third aim (2010-2015) was to arrive to a first chronological panorama of the site through levels in stratigraphy and the assemblage of pottery and other significant evidence with the individual levels (N. Manassero – A. Fusaro – A. Tilia). Deep trenches were excavated (T/7 and T/9 on the Italian side; T/1 on the French side near the western portion of the bastions skirting the Hindu Temple. These brought to the very early Sasanian period or late Indo-Parthian (c. II-III Century CE), then the water-table invaded the trenches preventing us to go deeper; however, drillings (T/9) have allowed to go deeper for c.1,8 mt of shards …thus reaching a much earlier occupational phase. The question about an Hellenistic occupation at the bottom of the site (Arrian’s harbour of Alexander) is still unanswered… a dream…but the importance of Banbhore has induced to take it seriously and include it within our priorities. Ours and the French trenches have also produced significant information on the architectural panorama of the site for its earlier periods of life. A main N-S and E-W road axis was traced. The site was organised in insulae, each insula with its pits of organic and inorganic refusals, densely built along narrow roads by small mono-nuclear houses, roofed, bases in local stones and the elevation in unbacked bricks. Interesting the presence of refusals of some crafts, as if each building had at the same time the function of “home” and workshop. The refusals shew activities of ivory-working (T/1,T/4, T/9), and other crafts carried out “within the bastions of the citadel”, such as glass, shells and mother of pearl, alloys and various metallurgic activities, too, and so on. Significant the presence of a wealth of clay-moulds. T/5 has produced a clay-mould nearly intact in its shape. No less interesting, in the deeper layers, the presence of a well arranged organisation of the hydraulic resources (small canals, little domed cisterns in roughly cut local stones, wells..: T/9). One element of the site attracted our attention: the so called “Partition Wall”. It has a North-South direction; then, it bends Eastwards, including the Mosque and the Eastern lagoon, but cutting out the majestic Southern Gate. So far, it had been interpreted as a Wall that had a “religious” or “social” function to separate – after the Islamic conquest – the Muslims from the non-Muslim inhabitants of the site. Manassero dedicated the 2014 Field-Season to investigate: T/7 and T/8 were the trenches that gave a new profile to this structure and to the general occupational organisation of the citadel during its last period of life. The round-shaped tower in mud-bricks and the walls on both sides show that they had been hurriedly erected in a late phase of the life of the citadel (around the end of the X – early XI Century CE). They had been built on the top of pre-existing buildings either abandoned and collapsed or hastily flatted-down, likely to defend this eastern portion of the site and its Mosque by some human ravage that had succeeded to open a breach in the lower western bastion leaving the higher north-eastern area exposed to attacks (the skeleton found by Dr Kervran on her portion of the wall, and Khan’s skeletons with arrow-heads in their skulls and chests). According to F.A. Khan’s excavations and what he left us in his little booklet that so far – printed and re-printed – is the guide for visitors to Banbhore, in the eastern portion of the site during the latest stage of its life still stood beautiful palaces, the Friday Mosque, markets, and an eastern gate where a staircase (still in situ in the 2015) brought to a lagoon at the foot of the eastern bastions and to the river. At the end of this first stage of our historical and archaeological research-work, the identification of the site of Banbhore with the historic Sasanian/Indo-Sasanian fortified harbour-town seemed quite feasible. When we resumed our field-work in the 2017, we decided to go deeper in this direction. In the meantime, Dr Manassero had resigned due to personal choices of life. Dr Simone Mantellini bravely accepted to be our Field-Director for the archaeological sector. T/9 had unearthed an imposing Building (Building 1) running along the East-West road-axis, parallel to a second Building (Building 2). The road – wide about 5 meters – must have been a major road, that had played a central role within the general architectural urban asset of the site. Building 2 had the typical structure of the local houses: base in rough stones, elevation in mud-bricks. Excavations of Building 1 produced fillings well flatted and an endless chronological procession of floors in row mud, likely the re-occupation of an important palace during the last phase of the occupational life of Banbhore. The material (pottery and others) associated with the various levels in stratigraphy (Dr A. Fusaro) confirmed the dating of the dug portion from c. the early XIII to the XI Century CE. Historically speaking, it makes sense: chronicles of the time report about the invasion of Lower Sindh by the Seljuks (second half of the XI Century CE); they indulge on the assaults against the walls of its great harbour-town named Daybul, its long siege concluded with a peace-treaty that fixed the border with Makrān at Gwadar and gave to Daybul an autonomous status (nāḥiya) within the Seljuk dominion of Qāvurd-Khān ibn Chaghrī Beg. More interesting was the copious filling with ivory refusals. Along Building 2, were found semi-worked shells, glass, iron and brass rivets, iron instruments, alloys, coins and other. This induced to think to a late quarter of work-shops outside the Partition Wall, built on previous buildings. Lastly, some surveys extra-moenia and in the Lahiri Bandar and Mullah-ka Kot islands have revealed a close connection and interaction between these spaces and the citadel. Around the bastions: the remains of a densely settled area and a well organised regulation of the waters and the territory, rock quarries, urban quarters, dwellings, cairn-tombs (some of them re-used), an artificial lake of sweet water delimited to the south by a “barrage”, wells, and a vast so called “industrial area” to the north-northwest of the bastions, pottery kilns and others completed the image of a urban asset at least for a given span of time. Architectural and archaeological evidences have regularly been graphically, photographically and topographically documented (A. Tilia). Archaeometric analyses on the job (pottery, metals, alloys, coins…) and in Italy (ivory, glass, clay-moulds, shards…) have provided precious support and new elements to the archaeological work. We are now confronted with the plan of a positive shahristān. Banbhore is no longer only a fortified citadel. Written sources in Arabic and Persian confirm this feature. After the Jan.-Feb. 2018 field-season, the Islamic occupational phase of Banbhore and the “archaeological park” surrounding it enhanced this image: a positive fluvial and maritime system stemmed out, a well-fortified system and harbour-town, a centre of mercantile power, production and re-distribution of luxury goods, an international centre of pilgrimage and religious learning, too, outlet to the sea of the capital-city of the moment. For the forthcoming field-seasons, it was decided to concentrate the attention on the sector where the North-South axis crosses the East-West one. In particular: to further investigate Building 1; to look for the ivory-workshops that must be there around – given the copious pieces so far brought to light and used as refilling (more than 9.000 fragments) and some fragments of rough ivory (specialist of the Italian Team G. Affanni); to organise a deep-trench in the Pakistani sector (T/11), in order to resume Manassero’s investigations on the urban and architectural features of the pre-Islamic phases...and (why not?) try to overcome the water-table problem with the technological support offered by the Bahrya University of Karachi…the much dreamed quest of Alexander the Macedonian’s port. All in all and to conclude. Nowadays, at the end of this first stage of historical and archaeological research-work in collaboration with the DAS, the identification of the site of Banbhore and its surrounding area with the Sasanian/Indo-Sasanian and the Early-Islamic well-fortified harbour-town of Daybul/Debol can be confirmed. No other site with the characteristics described by the written sources of the time (chronicles, geographies, travelogues…plus Marco Polo and some significant Genoese archival documents) has so far come to light on the Indus deltaic region. Conversely, still un-answered are other queries: Banbhore can be identified also with the great harbour of Alexander the Macedonian? Or with the Barbaricum/Barbarikon/Barbariké, harbour-town of Parthian rulers or local lords of “Skuthia”, also mentioned in the Periplus Maris Erythraei? Or again with Dib/Deb, harbour mentioned in a Parthian-Manichaean text? Or again the Dibos of Greek sources? Or the Dêbuhl/Dêphul of an Arminian text à propos of the Prophet Mani? Wishful thinking; however, these queries represent some amongst the ambitious aims of our future research-work.