A pegada de sexta-feira: notas para uma arquitectura partilhada

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the cultural role of architecture. Using the work of Daniel Defoe - The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe - as a motto, we study the architect in three different ways: fi rst, as a subjectivation of a cultural condition, capable of a unique view of objects and reality; second, as an expressive agent of an idea of architecture, culture, art, language; and third, as a precursor of a communicative relationship fulfi lled through architectural objects. We start by defi ning the act of knowledge based on the dialectic relation between subject and object, producer of a representative reality, linked to a personal and cultural image repertoire and conditioned by the circumstance in which the subject apprehends the surrounding environment. We also analyze the process in which the images appear, born from the selection of sensitive data and the comparison with images held by memory. First, we explore the processes of signifi cation and culture, understanding how the representations and images made by each subject base the identity and culture of a human society. We also see how language, which allows subjects to communicate the images on their repertoire, functions as an essential device for sharing this cultural identity, even if it is done by a repeating update. Next, we understand how the communicative process, defi ned as an interaction between an emitter and a recipient via a signal, is dependent on the interpretation of a specifi c code and recipient. In a second phase, we study art from a cultural point of view, as a mean of transforming language and convention. We se how a work of art is equally dependent on a subjective representation that bestows it meaning. At the same time, we characterize the functional object linking it to a specifi c set of cultural, social, and historical expectations. Finally, we address the architectural object assigning it denotative and connotative values that exist in relation with the subject's ability to recognize them. In the third phase of this dissertation, we deepen our knowledge of the dialectic relationship between subject and object, now from a corporal point of view. Starting with the concept of guest, which signifi es the meaning that eludes its host's intellect and hospitality, we address a pre-objective reality, born out of the relation between the body and the things that surround it, that precedes the representation, signifi cation and cogitation of the subject. At last we arrive at the concept of habit, defi ned as temporary result of the mutual construction of man and world, which results of dwelling, defi ned as a human way of being that maintains this construction ongoing. In the last part of the dissertation we compare what we have studied so far, so that we can express the main problem of this investigation. Using the concept of home, we encounter a poetic imagination that revolutionizes language, communication and geometry, and manifests the inhabitant's legitimate search for a place of reverie and dream. Not a place tied to the will and project of its architect, but a place that evolves with the changing needs of its inhabitants, whether they're functional, symbolic, cultural, social or poetic.