A expansão e a cidade Portuguesa

Abstract

This essay's starting point is the conviction that urban culture is the element that distinguishes the architect's gesture that, through action, always makes the city. The goal of this present work is to recognize the expression of this urban culture, in the shapes, processes and models that, in a precise and rich time of its history, were necessary to cleanse and synthesize so to arrive to other scales and geographies. It is this urban culture, the portuguese, and this time, the expansion, that is approached. We call out to history, conscious of the open meaning it proposes and the vitality it declares, as a fact inseparable from the city, which is seen as the complete affirmation of the collectivity and that, in the history of the Portuguese city, reveals itself of an universal dimension. The time is situated in the XV and XVI centuries, looking at the context of the Atlantic Islands, Brazil and India, intertwined with the Portuguese city, in this period of the Metropolis, and the expression of the city is thought in a project expected to be maritime, that became urban, in the onset of the modern and the diligence of action. Agents and policies are articulated and the transition between the models of the medieval experience and the modern influence is made. Significant reminiscences of the mediterranean and roman synthesis in the portuguese urban culture are intercepted and the relationship of the city with the territory points to its specificity. The interest is born in the beginning of a phenomenon, the expression of the absolute value of urban invention, that reads across the different scales of action, rescues the meaning of an urban culture that is perceived as very portuguese.