Alcaria de Mazes - Reconhecimento, Reflexão e Princípios de Intervenção

Abstract

Alcaria de Mazes is the object of study of this work and also of an analysis which doesnt confine to this particular case but it spreads and considers the knowledge of the territory on which it depends and it is related to. So we tried to understand it as a part of this more embraced logic, in a gradual scale of territorial and chronological approach, which goes from general to specific. The work is divided into three chapters which are linked, in a continuous analysis process, deepening in a different way the several approach parameters and emphasizing the aspects concerning the architecture field. In this way, in our first chapter we framed the object of study in space and time, by inserting the three identified units in historical and geographical context: macro, sub and micro alveolar unit. These delimitations are very clear when we cross the different overlapped levels, related to orography, history, vegetation, hydrography, geology and population, reinforcing the importance of a whole and comparative reading which allows us to check the similarities and differences. Protected the importance of its more general framing, in second chapter we tried to do a slower analysis of the agglomerate, understood as a result of more specific conditions, which make it so characteristic. We tried that the analysis/characterization of urban and architectonic structure of the agglomerate and its morphological, typological and constructive understanding is useful not as an end itself but as a reading which should be a support to intervention which, we presume, will be very particular and specific in the answer given to a real program and in its suitability to a so particular pre-existence. In last chapter, we introduce the intervention/rehabilitation problematic. The strategy began with the definition of general principles of intervention followed by a longer explanation of each expressed topics. From the list of programmatic pretensions rise some questions related with the criterion used in its distribution and adjustment to existing structures, establishing some reflections in relation to the way to deal with infra structural impositions and with rural image/identity. We believe that the intervention principles should not restrain to agglomerate but should consider the different territorial units. At micro unit level this should contribute to the connection of its different parts, reinforcing simultaneously the importance of clarifying the idea of constructive landscape and widening the requalification of the surrounding space.