Memórias de uma cidade-mirante. Pela valorização da paisagem urbana do Funchal

Abstract

In a constantly changing world, the tendency is to lose the elements that connect us to the past. The growing pace of urban transformation we have been witnessing, has inevitably led to a globalization that tends to erase the values of a collective identity. It is the particular and defining qualities of each territory that must be the object of a preservation effort, not only in the sense of conservation but above all in the sense of reinterpretation. How to act in this circumstance? How to preserve and reintroduce these values in a changing territory? We seek for an architecture of the common in our daily life that constitutes some of the main factors of individualization of the landscape and the urban experience of our city, Funchal. We began to build a methodological basis for reading and analyzing these relevant fragments of the territory's cultural identity. If this action denounces a position that seeks to defend a way of making-city that welcomes and makes possible, it is pertinent to evoke an architecture that frees itself from formal constrainings and allows its adaptation. Make the future of its practice essentially dependent of principles of continuity. This manifestation evokes the desire to, using the past, equate the construction of the future. This apparent infinite horizon. This diffuse but concrete line that defines an uncertain periphery that must gain sense as a platform where life may happen, day-by-day, thus affirming our conviction about the symbolic extension of inhabiting a place in the world.