Fragmentos de cidade. Imagens de arquitectura, do espaço e da memória

Abstract

The title Fragments of city, images of architecture, space and memory announces an investigation that, anchored to abstraction and a set of disruptive and untrustless thoughts, aims to decode the enigma of the real world, where city and architecture converge. A momentary abandonment of the physical world (under the promise of returning there) promotes tangency with art and image, their authors and their works that preserve the best of both material and immaterial worlds. Scattered fragments and images with their own will power dominate the layer of unconsciousness as traces and nuances of architecture that never allow us to abandon it, physically and spiritually. Conceived as an archive of the present, this dissertation opens an invisible space between reality and fiction, denouncing that its end is not equivalent to a conclusion, but instead, of a interruption, as a significant mark that precedes a future practice of architecture. The dissertation aspires to a 'work made of fragments' (identical to the ambition of Walter Benjamin). Fragments that spread from form to content, from structure to method and intention, provisionally divided into four moments materialized into four boxes (boîtes), in an analogy to the organization of an archive. Before the beginning, boîte 0 is dedicated to the extraordinary revelation of three reading letters essential for understanding the total body, an incentive to look at before reading. Then, the first part (boîte 1) introduces the study through four essays or four (re-)readings of the city from the key concepts of Fragment, Utopia, House and Ruin. The second moment (boîte 2) describes the four privileged instruments regarding the perception and representation of space, its fragments and images: Photography, Archive, Atlas and Collage. In an approximation to the experimental condition, the last part (boîte 3) rehearses the environment of a laboratory where manipulated images and ideas unfolds in three exercises of own authorship. From the house to the world, from the paper to the public space, fragmentary experiences are exhibited in spite of the web of contradictions of the real, in an approximation to the multidisciplinary manifestation of an architectural project. The intention of producing a movement against the static and immovable reality is accomplished by the wandering between chapters, through images and works that enrich the critical and innovative study on architecture and its current circumstance.