Projecto e contexto pensado. Na obra de Serôdio, Furtado & Associados

Abstract

Isabel Furtado and I have been doing projects in architecture and designing objects and furniture for the past twenty-three years, since we graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto. Some of these projects have been transformed into buildings, while others were the result of public competitions. During that time, I have written and published several texts on our professional activity, expressing our concerns and motivations, and what makes us do what we do as we do. I decided to compile and present this collection of my works and texts in a document "for the degree of doctor based on the recognition and analysis of works" pursuant to Decree-Law no. 230/2009 of 14 September. The structure adopted for the document aims to show how, over these years of activity, certain theoretical and formal themes were built up, some of them present from the start, how they were explored, clarified and strengthened, as mental abstractions, formal tests and constructions. The document structure also allows an understanding of which concerns have been consolidated and which, while not being present at the start of the activity, have been gradually built up and have become fundamental. In a more pragmatic way, it also tries to show the means used and the nature of architectural research we applied to each idea, revealing its progress and outcome. The structure that serves this purpose, to show and demonstrate the progress, could not but respect the chronological evolution of the works and the writings. Evolution also means time, so the structure of the document follows a chronological order, regardless of the architectural themes, and independent of the briefs or functions. From the start, the central concerns related to the development of the ideas that I had at the end of course, associated with those acquired during our internship at the Herzog and De Meuron studio. The method of research, of investigation, was to search for the material, the physical expression of these concerns, focusing on the search for order, in the unifying sense of the "rule" for the project, condensing in this rule the geometrical "instructions", the formal reason, and the intangible "meaning", as "just one thing"; the annulment of the dichotomy between form and its meaning, into a "synthesis" that purges all representation, that summarises form into the minimal elements organised by a logic, a rule. The means are those of representation, drawing, accurate sketching and models. Then came increasing complexity, both in terms of the formal response and the briefs and requirements of the projects. This increased complexity seems natural to me, almost resulting from the sequence, size, circumstance and nature of the projects. There was a conscious search for more complex rules, rules that allowed this relationship between the proposed form, the expression of the 8 PROJECTO E CONTEXTO PENSADO brief and the context to be visible, rules that generated form whose geometric elementariness would not erase the complexity of these relationships, while maintaining a formal evidence. The document is a collection of drawn elements, photographs and writings from more than twenty years of project activity associated with the theoretical records of these moments. These elements, together, contain information on the relationship between the thinking and the built results.