Aires Mateus: Da Permanência em Arquitetura

Abstract

The present dissertation is born from the desire to sediment a (personal) architecture project, gradually built. A project based on the conviction that to design is to operate on a set of recurring problems and, therefore, timeless, from an (ever) renewed awareness of the present time; this present, in which, like a palimpsest, the multiple layers of the past are superimposed, of which we believe to be little more than mere translators. However, a critical look at reality reveals a world in which what was once solid - from knowledge to matter - is fragmenting and dissolving, at a rhythm that puts into question any possibility of permanence and, therefore, the principle from which we started. Thus, at first, we propose to go back to the beginnings of modernity, in search of the reasons for such a paradigm, revealing, along the way, its evolution and some of its transversal consequences (beyond those that are generally known). Thus, in a second moment, the main question of this dissertation arises - how to build the possibility of permanence in architecture? This will be the starting point of a study centred on the design strategies of a duo of architects who claim this condition of permanence for architecture: Manuel Aires Mateus (1963) and Francisco Aires Mateus (1964). Aires Mateus. Da Permanência em Arquitetura thus constitutes a gradual process of discovery that, more than concrete answers to our question, contributes to a process of awareness, without a certain beginning or announced end.