Porto, área de S. Victor. Cidade - Arquitectura - Política. Realidade e Desenho

Abstract

This thesis emerges from a concern that grew along my academic path, result of the constant observation of way the City (Porto in particular) was being made, and where the sense of "political community" viewed by Aristoteles as something towards the common good seemed to get lost between the time and the money, and where architecture appears to be sedated by its own speech. From that concern, and with the willingness not to look the other way - as warned by Ignasi Solá-Morales - this work seeks to set sailing to high seas, with Luz Valderrama and in particular Deleuze as inspirations to build the structure and form a paradigm of thinking-communicating it. By taking their challenge, we confront ourselves with the unknown ocean that is reality, and, in the memory of the classes in Berlin under Jean-Philippe Vassal's guidance, set to work with it, with its qualities and defects, desiring to transform it. The choice of S. Victor area in Porto is not made directly but through successive approximations to a complex and heterogeneous territory, which first becomes an investigation scene. This is a place left in oblivion, the place where we seek to read, think and communicate strategies to change it. Throughout the investigation, searching for project alarms, we focus on the degraded structure of the "ilhas", social condensers which cover great part of the area under study. It is an urbanism on the ground, leaning on Lacaton & Vassal position which seeks to take lessons from them in order to offer new possibilities. The work tries to convene the City, the Architecture and Politic as three planes that intersect constantly, casting lines between them, clashing themselves and generating lines of fugue. We seek to build a personal posture, a way of looking to the world that shelters itself under the thesis title in three stages or plans. The first plan focuses on the confrontation strategy, launched by Eduardo Mosquera as a tool to work with the existent. The second recognizes the existent as project material and the third sees the architect as a processes strategist while operant producer aware of his role and where is in the production system. We venture ourselves in a first reading of the place made by approaches, advances and setbacks, one that seeks to read and communicate the study area, one that what defines it for, then, and between "realidade e desenho", transform part of these readings, in particular the ones over the "ilhas", in project. A project that we see as a montage, as a construction of an open script, one to be written also by others, by all others who are convened in the time to think this place, any place. This is a place of research that could be read as a rhizome, in a logic of multiplicity that can be branched out at any point, an open system that seeks the future-place, an event that seeks to to be captured in its own potential, not catching the present existence but rather the opportunities of a place to come.