Do Problema à Arquitectura. Da zona residencial à dinamização urbana do território de Aldoar

Abstract

The concept of "sleeping area" won over the last century, a relevant role in the perception of our cities' structure. The functional segregation that these areas have been subjected to revealed numerous problems referring to a social level, limiting the collective life to the intra-family relationships. However, the modern notion of "habitat", exceeding the notion of home, extends to the entire space described by the family and their daily needs: "the person lives passing organically from the isolation of his inner life to the familiar community, and from this to the group or community of families". In order for this "community of families" to become a "balanced community" it needs to characterize the spaces that promote the collective life of neighborhood groups. Hence the need for a realistic programming of public areas and collective equipments. Here, the social role of the Architect gets relevance, at first, while theoretical, seizing the urban and morphological evolution of the territory of Aldoar, the case study, where the residential character is accentuated by the lack of public equipments, spaces of collective life and urban elements that promote interaction and even social cooperation, capable of bringing this region, now a "sleeping area", to a real urban residential unit. From the understanding of the interventions and the large urban guidelines that were in the genesis of peripheral attachments of the City, specifically in the West area of the City, which led to the consolidation of the "sleeping area" status of the region, it is possible to define the problem to which architecture, as praxis, responds. Now, It is possible to define a place, a program, and therefore projecting an urban equipment capable of stimulating the transformation of this residential area, giving it an urban character, integrated, promoting the collective quotidian life in this region. Appointed as one of the main necessities in the area, the proposed equipment will have a cultural sphere, and it is designed for the entire population of Aldoar, and more particularly to associations and cooperatives, that have been set up in the area, even without proper spaces for its initiatives. This new cultural space intends to minimize the monofunctionality to which this territory was being conducted to. Thus, giving meaning to architecture, the development of a project emerges as the solution to a problem diagnosed by the theoretical approach to the urban reality of Aldoar.