Intervir no existente. O lugar de Vilar

Abstract

Over the last years there has been a progressive transformation and adulteration of the landscape of the national territory, as a consequence of a diversified set of circumstances of which we stress the modernization and deep technological transformation occurred, especially during the second half of the XX century. There were new logics of occupation, distribution and organization of the territory that determined the abandonment of certain areas of the country or led to a process of growth and spread of the urban fabric, causing a deep transformation in a vast territory of rural matrix. In both cases, as A Domingues (2012) points out, the loss of "the stable links that unraveled the narrative film of rural reality" and the progressive abandonment of settlements and rural structures and, consequently, the loss of Rural Portugal and its vernacular heritage. In cases where there has been an extension of the urban condition to the countryside and, in particular, to the hidden places of the portuguese vernacular world, there are profound changes in the pre-existing constructions, whose genesis and foundation relied in a specific way of living and a specific context, very diverse from the present ones. In other cases, keeping alive the memory of a past time, many of these constructions are abandoned and in the process of progressive degradation or in a state of ruin. In both situations, there is a dynamic of recovery of this built heritage throughout the national territory, trying to adapt it to a new way of living and new uses, in an always difficult exercise of preservation of relations and continuities with the past. Lugar de Vilar, in the municipality of Marco de Canaveses, is an example of this irreversible passage of time and the modernization of the surrounding areas, compromising its validity and value, insofar as the sense of use and the way of living that was associated to them are out of date. Assuming as essential the necessary transformation that the condition and demands that the present time imposes on this cluster, we consider that it is important to reflect and to equate hypotheses of intervention in this small and old vernacular settlement that can give it new meaning and use, and that allows their rescue from the current condition of abandonment, making possible the construction of a new identity. Thus, the research and reflection work developed, on which the rehabilitation project proposed in this thesis is based, provides an opportunity to test a hypothesis of intervention in a real context and an approximation to a practice of architecture in a professional context.