Da Estética à Técnica. A casa, a cozinha e a ruína num projeto para o Douro

Abstract

Any ruin may give rise to interpretations of how it might have been inhabited, since our imagination is stimulated by tangible traces of something that refers to a distant time. Until, at certain moments, these thoughts may be projected into an idea of the future, from the transposition of some imagined reality from one time to another, "skipping" the present. It is between the past and the future that almost everything emerges, including architecture and also this project. Following the path of the stones that make up the thick walls of the small building, one realises that the Douro landscape, dazzling and apparently natural, has been profoundly humanised, as it has been shaped by successive excavations of the soil and by the construction of walls with the resulting stones. These walls, formed by carefully stacked stones, serve both to support land and platforms and to build spaces. The work was developed from the search for confrontation between themes related to emotion and technical aspects. The aim was to operationalize the research on these subjects belonging to different 'worlds', by sketching ideas for the transformation of that place. To understand a ruin it is necessary to understand time. And to build something new too: with the passing of time the 'new' will be old and the 'old' will be older.