Pedro Gadanho (1968) is an architect, curator and writer. He is the author of the blog Shrapnel Contemporary, where he shares his innovative views on cities and how they can be improved. With a diverse career in contemporary culture – architecture, design, visual arts –, he has developed different activities, from architecture projects to exhibit commissioning, editing and his teaching activity at the Architecture Faculty of the University of Porto, where he taught from 2000 to 2003.
He was the editor-in-chief of the BEYOND, Short-stories on the Post-Contemporary book series, for Sun Publishers in Amsterdam. He organized a round table at the Venice Architecture Biennial ’08, where he was also part of the Advisory Panel for the British Pavilion in the 2010 edition. He was a co-organizer of the 1st International Architecture and Fiction Conference, entitled Once Upon a Place. He published the book Arquitectura em Público, in 2011, with Dafne publishing house, on the media coverage of architecture, which earned him the FAD award, one of the most important architecture awards in the Iberian Peninsula, on the category of Thought and Criticism.
As a curator, the exhibits he has organized include Space Invaders, for the London British Council, and Pancho Guedes, An Alternate Modernist, for the Swiss Museum of Architecture, in Basel, among many others. In 2012, Pedro Gadanho was appointed the Curator for Contemporary Architecture at the New York MoMA (Museum of Modern Art). He was involved in the YAP (Young Architects Program) project, a platform that seeks to discover new architects and develop new ideas, through installations in museums in New York, Rome, Istanbul and Santiago, Chile.
After that valuable international experience, at one of the most prestigious museums in the world, the EDP Foundation invited him to manage the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, in Lisbon. Considering this challenge more exciting than the one he had in New York, Pedro Gadanho decided to return to his country and accept the position.