— VISÃO PERIFÉRICA

“In Architecture, the written production of architectural authors oscillates between extremes: sometimes it is excessively directed towards theoretical production, sometimes it is excessively based on practical production, that is, on their works of architecture, referring the writing to a punctual, sometimes unsystematic activity or, if we want, residual.

The art has been referring the thought about the art and its production to the external critical aspect, linking in a growing and more frequent way the theoretical production to the philosophical thought. It’s the distance that exists between the production of the artistic object – the act of creation – and the process of interpretation, seriation or analysis that leads us to consider the understanding of the artistic phenomenon as a ‘critical act’ per se and, consequently, to understand that the texts on art invite us, how many times, to immerse ourselves in the aspects related to argumentation, demonstration, comparison and sometimes evaluation, outside the context of the maker and the author.

In architecture, the critical object is usually linked to the work done, to a construction and sometimes to the method of conceiving or producing it. Thus, the work is still today the subject of analysis and theoretical development, which leads to the interest of many authors – who are also architects – for the critical or conceptual production on the vast domain that the disciplinary field of architecture offers for this disciplinary revision. It is precisely within this framework that this book is justified”.