Projecto para uma rede urbana

Abstract

Projecto para uma Rede Urbana, stems from a concern about the current conjecture of cities, from their physical to metaphysics realms, which as a whole become fields of difficult perception. As interveners in the formulation of this field, as architects, who want to find out to what we are going to, how are we getting there and, especially, why we are going. We like to believe that the built environment can still meet conditions that express the value of communities and people, that we do not live in a world of hyper forms, that don not respond to the condition of man, that go beyond him and exist to give body to abstract concepts that have for him little consideration. We have to understand that paradigms are changing at the speed of powerful search engines available in most fingertips. That this speed is quickly soaking into the rhythm of society and consequently in its reflection in the world of forms. That everything seems to be possible and, if not, it is legitimate the abuse of image manipulation software until it is. In this situation there is an instinct, perhaps not natural but instructed, that leads to careful reflection about reality in order to see how it goes from here forward. No certainties, only with the conviction that maybe we live in too fast of a machine but slightly oiled, with many cheap parts copied in unreliable material, probably produced by the hand of illegal work. A machine that needs an urgent review. On the other hand, to attempt on what today conforms the our practice is to meet a plurality of postures with a fairly large margin distance between them. Similarly, when looking at the reflection of this multiplicity in the universe built in the city, you see the plurality of solutions, scales, ways to use common spaces, ignore them, to leave them or make them our own. Without claiming to answer pre-made questions, but going apart the complex picture on which we will operate to, perhaps, reach the formulation of certain questions. "This is the record of a search". In two parallel moments, which will contagiously cross, one of Incursões where several advances are made to try to define the condition of the project, other of direct Contact over an area of Porto, are the structure of the research. This separation, seeks to make the contact with the object free of the demands of the study of terms that describe the implicit phenomenon, objectively focusing on the value of the identified opportunities. Thus, a first level of reading, to identify contemporary practices of similar purpose and scope of proposals, is essential to give body to the intuition. In this sense, there is the attempt of an identification of the concepts under which the speech for a new approach to the city is built. Like the construction of an articulated doll, the conjecture of possibilities on the city setting, allows us to mount the image of this field of action. This drawing, although fragmented, is an important resource to develop the innate stammer that comes when you learn to speak a new language.