Processo de Construção de uma ideia - ampliação e reabilitação de uma casa na Figueira da Foz

Abstract

This dissertation explores the design process of a house in Figueira da foz as its main study subject. To communicate that process is to communicate the making of architecture. In this case, it is intended to render how the desire of inhabiting a place has been converted into the house's architecture. The desire of inhabiting a place is the the first purpose leading the project. In the beggining everything is fuzzy, the project arises from information which is collected from the place and the client. The first sketches are already the expression of an attitude towards the reality that seems threatening and colossal. The need to risk forms in order to achieve new questions, more conscious, more focused, show up right from the start. In each new element introduced, excluded or transformed there is a need to reorganize the designed forms because harmony lies in the relation between things. According to this principle the project arose without any single theory or composition, instead, it has been built in close dialogue with the diverse aspects, having in mind that form is a transitory expression of an idea. The project's attitude and the thoughts on domestic space have been built throughout the process relying on several means of expression (plans, sections, sketches, images, memories and writings). Architectonic questions within the project lead me to case-studies which are never considered as finished and reproductible models. The mismatch between contemporary inhabitation needs and the existing reality trigger the project's thoughts with the notion that place is an ever-changing reality. The project appears as a piece of that work in progress seeking in every single moment to assimilate different wishes of multiple partners. So, the design process is organized in diferent stages of comprehension and synthesis which allow me to deal with the various aspects implicated and to build a personal experience based on client's and place's identity. The ideas, client's and mine, are constantly confronted with the reality in which they want to grow having in mind the value of drawing as an instrument which sets limits to the intervention, in order to put the questions in [its] place.