— THICK AS A BRICK

“More than a monograph, on the vast scenographic work of Nuno Lacerda Lopes, architect and professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, this book presents texts of reflection and criticism on the different processes of conception of architectural spaces and the recent evolution towards the scenographic and representation spaces that today’s architecture is developing.

Therefore, it also presents itself as a pedagogical and reflective instrument destined to all those who intend to follow or study the performing and theatrical arts as well as, the new architects who seek other paths and expressions for their architectures”.

Por isso, apresenta-se também como um instrumento pedagógico e de reflexão destinado a todos os que pretendem seguir ou estudar as artes performativas e teatrais bem como, os novos arquitetos que procuram outros caminhos e expressões para as suas arquiteturas.”

Excerpt

“The Idea”

“It was intended the creation of a scenic, multipurpose device, something playful and at the same time light, capable of transforming and adapting itself to the countless and almost always unthinkable needs of spatial-temporal resolution and aesthetics that contemporary theatre seeks: a multifunctional object without losing all the aesthetic and strategic discourse of the show, without putting at risk the discursive coherence of the production that Ricardo Pais always claims and that here in this work, more than demonstrating, seeks above all to enforce.

The existence of amplification for the voice of the actors in some way suggested the solution for scenography, something urban, something under construction, something in provocation or maintenance; a space of daily life, of encounter and disagreement, a fleeting space, without concrete references to something, only suggestion, something ostensible…as taste. A space/place where bodies can touch and progress freely between objects and in the relationships they establish with them! Something that makes them move and provokes them, capable of stimulating their sensuality, their path, their Being…

I use scenography as experimentation. The scenography ends up being a place where I draw and look for many spatialities, which I then use in the architectures, almost always misaligned, that I like to do. Maybe because of the Theatre and my debut at Teatro D. Maria II, with a text by the Austrian Thomas Bernhard that asks us what we are doing here “if it is mathematics or theatrical art?” and that tells us that if you are a true artist only if you are crazy from head to toe, if you give yourself totally to madness, transforming it into your radical method? and the World thinks what it wants and writes what it wants, the artist cannot be a chicken.  And further on he tells us that we must disturb, disturb… disturb always.

Sometimes I ask if these words have been a harbinger and if they have been a milestone in the definition of my career and of all my activity in both scenography and architecture.I don’t know the answer yet, so I say: maybe… But they were important words that clarify in part a lot of the work I produce, both in Scenography, Furniture Design, Design and Architecture, of that I have no doubt!  And that’s why the line is curved and often as cloudy as the song!

The “stigma of difference” that marks the whole production of Ricardo Pais, assumes in this show a particular evidence when the shell is undressed… suggesting an essential but not minimal space, an object that transgresses the theatrical place and invokes the show!”

Nuno Lacerda Lopes

— SCENES – DO DESENHO À REPRESENTAÇÃO

“More than a monograph, on the vast scenographic work of Nuno Lacerda Lopes, architect and professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, this book presents texts of reflection and criticism on the different processes of conception of architectural spaces and the recent evolution towards the scenographic and representation spaces that today’s architecture is developing.

Therefore, it also presents itself as a pedagogical and reflective instrument destined to all those who intend to follow or study the performing and theatrical arts as well as, the new architects who seek other paths and expressions for their architectures”.

Por isso, apresenta-se também como um instrumento pedagógico e de reflexão destinado a todos os que pretendem seguir ou estudar as artes performativas e teatrais bem como, os novos arquitetos que procuram outros caminhos e expressões para as suas arquiteturas.”

Excerpt

“The Idea”

“It was intended the creation of a scenic, multipurpose device, something playful and at the same time light, capable of transforming and adapting itself to the countless and almost always unthinkable needs of spatial-temporal resolution and aesthetics that contemporary theatre seeks: a multifunctional object without losing all the aesthetic and strategic discourse of the show, without putting at risk the discursive coherence of the production that Ricardo Pais always claims and that here in this work, more than demonstrating, seeks above all to enforce.

The existence of amplification for the voice of the actors in some way suggested the solution for scenography, something urban, something under construction, something in provocation or maintenance; a space of daily life, of encounter and disagreement, a fleeting space, without concrete references to something, only suggestion, something ostensible…as taste. A space/place where bodies can touch and progress freely between objects and in the relationships they establish with them! Something that makes them move and provokes them, capable of stimulating their sensuality, their path, their Being…

I use scenography as experimentation. The scenography ends up being a place where I draw and look for many spatialities, which I then use in the architectures, almost always misaligned, that I like to do. Maybe because of the Theatre and my debut at Teatro D. Maria II, with a text by the Austrian Thomas Bernhard that asks us what we are doing here “if it is mathematics or theatrical art?” and that tells us that if you are a true artist only if you are crazy from head to toe, if you give yourself totally to madness, transforming it into your radical method? and the World thinks what it wants and writes what it wants, the artist cannot be a chicken.  And further on he tells us that we must disturb, disturb… disturb always.

Sometimes I ask if these words have been a harbinger and if they have been a milestone in the definition of my career and of all my activity in both scenography and architecture.I don’t know the answer yet, so I say: maybe… But they were important words that clarify in part a lot of the work I produce, both in Scenography, Furniture Design, Design and Architecture, of that I have no doubt!  And that’s why the line is curved and often as cloudy as the song!

The “stigma of difference” that marks the whole production of Ricardo Pais, assumes in this show a particular evidence when the shell is undressed… suggesting an essential but not minimal space, an object that transgresses the theatrical place and invokes the show!”

Nuno Lacerda Lopes

— ARCHITECTURE – From representation to the project

Concepts such as verticality, compression, vertigo, transfiguration, light, movement, body and its spatiality,… are themes that the sense of the “sensual” can systematize and that, in some way, can characterize the path of investigation and creation of objects, spaces and events that I have been producing. The architecture is the one of greatest expression.

Excerpt

“School of Mouriz

The school is based on an idea of landscape and, as a setting, its design is complimentary and its spatiality develops inside a wooden box that draws the horizon, organising it.

In the end, it seems to recover memories of the factory buildings that populate the area and above all the memory that we keep of this municipality that is Paredes.

The building has a stripped down and rigorous appearance, and is marked by its winding roof, whose movement at the top creates an illusion of an apparent city skyline.

Of the building, in a markedly longitudinal shape responding to the place, two closed surfaces stand out, punctuated by the apparently disordered repetition of the same span. In this way, punctual spans dance along the side elevations creating a vibrant rhythm that contrasts with the open tops, with wide windows. The movement created by the roof extends into the interior, infecting the spaces with its language materialized in unevenness and differences in heights, always resulting in diverse and distinct spaces”

— FURNITURE – From thought to drawing

In addition to the collection of the best furniture projects designed by architect Nuno Lacerda Lopes and his team over the last 20 years, this book brings together theorical memories of the creator’s intimate relationship with his works, as well as reports from “intruder” clients.

Excerpt

“The design of a piece encloses two opposing realities: one ideal and the other material. The design allows these opposites to be transformed into a unity, giving body to the natural relationship between man and objects, or between the man who inhabits it and Architecture. That is why I think of the objects, the furniture, as something that is familiar to us and that we should not annihilate creatively, but rather give continuity, adding other looks, needs and demands. They must be “equal” but also different. They must be “normal” but above all special; they must be “new” but impregnated with history and tradition. Finally, they must be necessary for man to exist”. (…) “

— HOUSES – From construction to dwelling

The book brings together a set of unique works of single-family housing designed by Nuno Lacerda Lopes. It proposes a reflection on contemporary housing, the different needs and demands that the theme of housing places on the architect attentive to change, people, places, materials and constraints. It is through works of diversified dimensions and expressions that we can understand the intense process of relationship and emotion that exists when designing and building a house.

Excerpt

“Drawing houses is a slow exercise, an adventure, an increasingly difficult and different process. Today, as in the past, it seems that no two people are alike and, to that extent, no two houses seem to be alike.

The diversity, the differentiation, seems to be a given for the project of a single-family house, or not? Today more than ever the question of individualism, uniqueness and singular identity is present in society, almost characterizing it. Consequently, it is present in Architecture!

Making a house is an emotion, a permanent questioning about countless ideas and definitions that we sometimes thought we had already solved and taken for granted. But a house, a house for a family, for a person, a land, a place… puts everything into question.

Making a home is an act of life, an experience, sometimes irreducible”.

— LEARNING – From project to construction

More than a set of projects or constructed works, this book seeks to describe a whole vision about a way of thinking, designing and building an ideal school or learning space, which over almost two decades we have been developing in various projects of different scales and, above all, with different programs and requirements.

The selection criteria stems from a narrative more linked to the understanding in which at a given moment we made the school space than the formal, plastic sense itself, or if we want to be typological and stylistic of the works presented.

Excerpt

“THE SCHOOL AS HOME

SOME NOTIONS ABOUT A CERTAIN IDEA OF HOUSING

(…) To inhabit is a global phenomenon and thus something exterior or “urbanized”, so its study implies a succession of interactions of the universal, public, private and intimate domain that to inhabit it promotes as a mixture of shared actions with the other inhabitants, in a sense of contamination and far from an idyllic metaphysical and theoretical habitation of the Being in the world that the mythical hut of Adam symbolizes in this lost but successively reconstructed paradise.

For this reason, we can accept the idea that we live, today, in the workplace, on the public highway, in schools, in churches and football stadiums, in car parks and in the endless “rows” of motorways, in theme parks and hotels, on the Internet and in the virtual house, in cinema and television, and therefore the thematic focus of this problem is shifted to the problems of everyday life, of relationality and novelty as a factor for understanding or “building” the concept of dwelling, in the presence of man and without his “habitation”, that is, without the modern archetypes of a dwelling for all built on the basis of a system or technical-financial logic of construction entrepreneurs in the metropolis that reproduce an ideal of dwelling for an ideal of a nuclear family, ever more distant. (…)”