Atlas da Percepção

Abstract

The aim of this research was to contribute to the understanding of how knowledge about the perception of space can nourish architectural practice and the way we think about the spaces that are the protagonists of our daily lives. This dissertation was born out of the desire to develop a final architectural project in the academic sphere, free from the requirements defined by a client and the legal impositions that practice encompasses. In this sense, the imagination and freedom of drawing, however utopian it may be, allows us to explore themes that practice restricts. However, we know that these impositions end up being transformed into parameters within which the project is developed, and the way in which the architect approaches these impositions ends up revealing the quality of the architectural work. With Eduardo Souto de Moura, we learnt that architecture is the resolution of problems specific to each context, but in this case, we can question whether pragmatism does not transcend the artistic dimension of architecture. Two globally accepted notions are that architecture, above all, alters a place and must serve the needs of the people who use it. Eugene Victor Walter argues that people, on a daily basis, tend to follow places, denoting their current state, their past and their development. In some cases, such as cities, identity is maintained without taking its transformations into account, as is the case with Rome, for example. What we retain is a sense of place, and we do so because of how it makes us feel and the meaning it carries. The sense of place and its integrity depend on the integrity of the perceptual experience. As such, the degradation of feeling and meaning is a threat to both architecture and the human being. Walter argues that we live at a moment in history when human beings systematically build meaningless places. Faced with a project free of technical and legal impositions and the desire to create a place with meaning, we tried to understand, from a theoretical point of view, how we should think about architecture so that it has quality and meaning. Given the complementarity of design and theory, we tried to catalogue the perceptual processes and objects of perception, which consequently belong to architecture. In the first moment, entitled "From the Earth", we analysed the concrete elements that make up the anatomy of the place that receives the project and the anatomy of the sensory systems responsible for our apprehension of the world, reflecting on how we should view the space of architecture. The second moment, entitled "From the Air", deals with the abstract components that make up architectural space. Although these components exist as a unit, in the form of an atmosphere, we decided to examine them in isolation and, to this end, to each of the constituents of the atmosphere, we assigned a work, where they are particularly relevant to its experience and perception.