— FROM THINKING TO BUILDING

“This book arises from the collection of a series of texts that were published in some furniture, architecture and scenography books, works that we have doing in recent years.

More than an organized reflection or a quest for a systematization, we prefer to present some of the texts that may indicate or contextualize a whole production or creation that intercepts different fields of project that are now in contemporary society presented to the architect.

So we’ll talk about representation, design, process and research: about an idea construction and from where ideas pop up; similarities and differences between the different disciplines, architecture and theater; the resemblance between the scholar space and the house where we live in; the places we attend and as these spaces affect and influence us; about materials and construction process, us and others; all that matters in attempting to make architecture, in attempting to organize a living space.

But we also talk about time and different times, that help us understanding the time we live in and that we build, the ideal of happiness and persistence, a willingness to build and desire. Emotions and experiences, ways of seeing the world and building it. So the title: “From thinking to building”, because is in building that we feel accomplished.”

— HABITAR A CENA

“Throughout the work, it will be studied general problems concerning space (the architect’s preferred field of work), its organisation, its representation and meaning, where man relates, perceives and realizes his existence.

Far from considering architecture as a system of a technical nature, but increasingly as a manifestation and response of man’s desires and feelings, an attempt is being made to apprehend man’s relationships and perceptive capacities in the use of space.

At the same time, it is not our purpose to give effective or definitive answers to the problems raised, but only to problematize the strict relationship between man’s living space and the spatiality that human life structures, articulated with time and the historical moment that gives it form.

We have no doubt that this proposed approach contains a certain amount of excess; however, because we consider this to be only a first step, we dare to take it, because it shows us the greatest interest in the experience of academic and professional life.

In short, it is the following question, often antithetical in terms of architecture, that we will try to provide some fragments of a reflection: the space to be seen (published) or to be lived?

— SOCORRO, ACABEI O CURSO

“This work could have many titles and above all different approach strategies, but it could only have one intention, which is to try to help young graduates, now masters from our schools, to start their professional careers successfully.

How to start and what to do in order to make a living from their courses, without great drama and trying to simplify their lives in an era where it is not easy to find work, where there is a very large supply of increasingly qualified professionals and especially when schools, colleges do not teach us what to do in order to be professionals, in other words, to live off what we “graduate” and to which we dedicate a large part of our life time, is what we will deal with here”.

— CONSTRUÇÃO INTELIGENTE

“The book that is presented here brings together a series of texts published in different contexts, on different occasions and for different audiences and, perhaps for this reason, with different registers and approaches. However, more than the search for a line of convergence that is always reductive and inconsistent with the diversity and the cataclysm of requests that current events bombard us, it is important above all to give substance to that diversity that the idea of building to inhabit offers us.

Now, more than ever, the effort of organization has resided in the search to gather some ideas around the problem of construction in Architecture, its different expressions in many works, in many authors and in many processes of understanding what architecture and construction itself are in contemporaneity.

The paradigm of construction and design for construction has changed significantly in recent years. Due to the speed of processing that today imposes on us, there seems to be no doubt about the need to talk about years and not decades – as we would once have talked about – as the time necessary for the sudden changes in concepts, processes, tastes, needs, demands, ways of doing, designing or building the spaces for our existence. Even values, principles and collective consciences now seem, more than ever, to be volatile matter and, therefore, an unstable territory where architecture has difficulties in establishing itself and growing.

Construction is still today an essential basis for the project and presents itself as the territory where architecture takes place, thus perhaps still the field where it is truly best understood. Knowing how to build necessarily involves knowing how to experiment, accepting the experience as a process of permanent learning. An experience that is also intended to be collective, capable of informing the project and the process of carrying it out. Method and reason to understand and create the emotion that true architecture offers today and always… ad eternum.

To think about this process of experience is now to think digitally and to use the new methods and tools available for the search of a more effective, assertive, sustainable and, therefore, more intelligent construction. And in this growing process of experimentation and permanent evaluation there are new skills and demands for the new Architect to whom these texts somehow intend to touch, stimulate and, if possible, worry”.

— OBRAS INCOMPLETAS

“The selection and organization of a set of texts written on different occasions, with different purposes and in different contexts; some edited or reinterpreted over several years, dealing with different themes, considered at some important time, may demonstrate, more than an expected discursive unity, a dangerous idea of divergence which, more than hiding, we seek here to explore.

Therefore, it is not a simple compilation, or a meeting of different approaches on a theme, nor are they a mirror of a unique and immutable way of seeing. And although they are not organised in chronological order, there has also been no temptation to arrange them by theme or subject, but rather the different times have been considered as indicators and conditioners of action.

“Incomplete works” is, in essence, the metaphor of the complex process of thought, of creation, of the project followed by construction and then, later, in the occupation, appropriation and transformation of the work that the architect carries out when he exercises his professional activity, transforming a desire, a commission, a will, into a work, building or place to live in.

(…)

More than a closed discourse on a specific theme of design, architecture or construction, what this set of texts explores is an ideal of confrontation, doubt and constant conflict between the different times of architecture, its paths and the principles that build it and experience it, its impossibilities and also the small achievements that are sometimes achieved”.

— 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”.