Reabilitação, reinterpretação e(m) evolução

Abstract

The present dissertation arose from the discovery of the 'ilha' at Rua da Arrábida 69, whose urban and landscape relationship suggested how this typology, despite its controversial origins, history and stigma, can create cozy and inviting spaces - as hospitality in adversity. Such initial curiosity expanded, leading to the interest in the very circumstance of the Lugar da Arrábida, which for various reasons proved passive to its urban densification. Currently, despite the isolation of this place, its views on the Douro and the various opportunities of occupation and construction have been attracting tourism and real estate interest. In a context where different realities intertwine - some self evident, other less - the architecture and urban planning project is here explored as a strategy of homeopathic and holistic processes, to the detriment of speculative and authoritarian intervention. Faced with the challenge of how to respond to the discontinuity of uses and meanings accumulated during the slow development of the Lugar da Arrábida, one can see in the exploration of the limits and overlaps between rehabilitation, reinterpretation and(/in) evolution, a challenging and transversal exercise at various scales and fields - from theory to construction, from politics to poetics, from urbanism to the home, from sociology to psychoanalysis, from common sense to good sense - in the construction of a theoretical body as the substance of a strategy of intervention. Thus this thesis emancipates both city and dwelling as inherent in a transmissible evolutionary process - malleable by those who inhabit it - where flexibility, affinity, metamorphosis and prospection come together as the base elements of this collective and individual construction. As a means of confrontation between theory and practice, experimental projects were developed at different scales, complexity and detail as autonomous interventions of a joint process.