Arquitectura intempestiva. Permanência. Acontecimento: Debilidade, Contingência, Disponibilidade

Abstract

Being the Untimely Architecture defined, by Ignasi de Solà-Morales, as "that which is born from the turmoil of any system of principles, traditions, and linguistic codes"1, what is intended in this dissertation is to simultaneously build and expose a perspective that pursues the idea of an architecture without immutable rules or laws, available to reinvent itself in each experiment, totally free to approach the realities where it intervenes, considering, to this end, the project as experience - openness to the unknown, willingness to be surprised (affected) by the circumstances, by what in them exists only as silence, that which can't be fixed trough language as a pure system of signs. The structure is divided in five moments that corresponded approximately to the different phases of the work: the first moment starts from the interpretation of the crisis of the Modern Movement as a crisis of the thinking of the Classical Age, to consider the dimension of art as opening of meaning, through resistance against universal systems, and attention to the concrete, the multiple, the singular; the second moment describes an approach to the notion of untimely or weak architecture, regarding minimalism as reduction to a minimum of production of meaning, through an experimental and phenomenological approach, and regarding three examples mentioned by Solà-Morales - Álvaro Siza, Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry -; in an attempt to avoid a static definition of this idea of architecture, the fourth moment introduces three disturbances, three Projects of contemporary architecture - Smiljan Radic, Lacaton & Vassal, Selgascano -, in which the experimental condition focuses on different types of operations, while suggesting also other forms of weakness; finally, the fifth and final moment is a return to the origins of some of the anxieties that propelled the construction of this narrative: a project exercise in the first year (2013), another during the period of dissertation (2017), and a relationship gradually built with the project of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, by Álvaro Siza (between 2012 and 2018).