Os Yegué - Arquitectura primitiva do século XXI

Abstract

This work has the rural area of Togo (Africa) as scenery, a specific space that appears as a framework for the re-evaluation of another setting of the contemporary project culture. The work focuses in the analysis of a study case in a developing country with evolving cultural and environmental transformations. An expedition to Yegué, Togo, allied to the work of the Novissi Onlus Association (Pescara, Italy) created the opportunity for a field work that seeks to understand, from the analysis of Yegué - a settlement of an underdeveloped country -how, facing local conditions, can the demands and pressures of globalization be reconciled with a sustainable development, preserving the local cultural values and traditions. Framed within this premise, a brief review on the origin of the global trade and cultural exchanges is performed to understand their influences on the settlement development in Africa. The contemporary culture of global imbalances - social, economic, political, cultural and architectural - is unfolded. The current geopolitical situation in Togo is analyzed along with the way the colonial action underscored the differences between "two worlds", affecting the development of settlements in rural Togo. The suggestion of 'crisis' stems from the scarcity of resources. Alternative ways of thinking and solving architectural problems are searched through the study of a culture based on minimal resources - a primitive culture. The opportunity to travel to Togo and the confrontation with the reality of the settlement drives a theoretical and practical research, assuming Yegué (Togo, Africa) as a "platform" where social and cultural values, traditions and local conditions are reconciled with the demands and pressures of globalization. The analysis of Yegué, a "laboratory" of human interaction, reveals the artistic phenomenon of architecture and the public space as real and tangible objects, in specific and historical scenery. Thus, the assessment of physical memories, reinvested with values that try to surpass the common concept of "poverty". The primary aim was to analyze identifiable features and factors that influence this architecture, and how they may be used nowadays. This is a personal interpretation based on the evidence of how people organize and use public space and architecture. The methods of the study were: to observe, describe and document the relationship of man and his pairs in the development of the settlement and architectural forms, as the end result of the codes and social norms or of the spontaneity to solve the challenges and benefit from the natural resources of the place. The collaboration with the Novissi Onlus Association - with the group of people living in and acting in Yegué - favored the development of the work within the concepts of sustainable architecture and to the clarification of the role of architects in similar settings. The study in Yegué and of its architecture - anonymous, spontaneous, indigenous, rural, primitive - and civilization/cultural values, was further developed. Architectural principles (tools for solving practical problems) that are transmitted through hundreds of generations, and that (seem) are eternally valid. The primitive included in the dialectic process between "two worlds" (as another perspective to consider in the process of contemporary architecture) to reach a sustainable architecture in the twenty-first century.