A Máquina do Vinho

Abstract

The dissertation we are presenting, entitled 'the wine machine', is a result of a theoretical reflexion around a project exercise from which we are trying to build a critical position about the exercise of architecture. We started from the need to design a winery for Quinta do Pessegueiro, in Portugal, to identify and explore a number of themes that while being particularly relevant in this exercise are always present in the practise of project and guide our way of seeing, thinking and doing architecture. The narrative we are presenting is divided in three parts, two of reflexion and one of practise. The Nietzschean binomial instinct-intellect, that looks towards exploring two different kinds of assimilation and building of knowledge, and the trial of that same knowledge through the creative act, in a third moment - the event. The instinct occupies itself with the themes that unraveled from the moment we started to design a winery. From the sensuality of the shapes of wine to the rationality and economy of the machines, there is a will to work out a position of balance between Apollo and Dionysos. A compromise between tourism and industry. The intelect refers to a building of knowledge that starts with an objective - to make clearer the exercise by the identification of the most important themes to the project of a winery. We try to study gravity, in its physical and metaphysical state, like the medium it operates in, the spacetime, where we intend to expose an understanding of light has a reference of time. The last text in this chapter builds on the notion of movement. In flows, we study the dynamics that allow for different changes of state in time. The event is the concretization of the knowledge built in the first two chapters through the creative act that intends to justify its relevance. From the ancient problem of the squaring of the circle, that scales man up against God, to the work of the limit betwen one and another thing, in interstice, we look for the freedom of a potential space, that presents itself has a structure of the experience, without trying to choreograph it. This dissertation views itself has a singular match. We are referring specifically to the game of wine constructions. A posture of project that looks forward to know the world it operates in with the same intensity it knows itself. A reflexion about a space we do not know yet, but that exists potentially.