Princípios de (uma) arquitectura

Abstract

By principles of architecture we mean the essential permanent factors that represent some architectural thought, and which are always present as guiding line in its practiced architecture. "Principles of [an] architecture" would mean those of a new positioning on architecture, through the approach of a specific one - the one practiced by Carlo Scarpa. The critical analysis find three pretexts of research in his work: the articles which are related to material issues (of matter and doing: the construction materials, formal motives and mechanisms). It produces spacial meanings, second and third pretexts. From the articles directly related to the spacial issues (devices of spacial definition and natural elements), meanings are assumed over the relation between man and architecture: by one side, we find the intimist configuration as dweling space; on the other side, the space experience through walking it. Gottried Semper, Adolf Loos and Kenneth Frampton justifies the matter and doing issues, confronting themes as covering, ornament, enclosure ant tectonics in Carlo Scarpa's architectural work. Recognizing its spacial meanings, Gastón Bachelard and Adolf Loos propone an intimate space to 'Villa Ottolenghi' and 'Tomba Brion'; Le Corbusier the "promenade" as a way of experiencing space, in which we use 'Negozio Olivetti' as a course-guide. As a poetic entity, architecture means a significative relation between thinking and doing; between conceiving and building. Architecture appears among connected facts in a "woof" that unifies its parts in a final purpose: through its own tools, architecture's poetry breathes some narration that intends to excite emotion. And, said Le Corbusier, when you get to emotion, you feel beauty. From this analysis it passes off the importance of materials, construction and ornament as crucial factor of the expressive form; Nature is a constant reality in the architectural conception, it is also an expressive element of form and composition, and has a strong simbolic weight to the individual. Architecture develops around the individual, who is the protagonist subject of space. Beauty, simultaneously present in all other principles, it represents a bigger principle, a unifyer one.