June 27, 2022

Architecture

José António Bandeirinha e Mauro Costa Couceiro

It is from the understanding of the relationship between City, Architecture and Project that the question of the research here presented arises: What project for the city of Guarda? It is a question that has an underlining understanding of the city as a collective cultural and political project, where architecture is its material expression, revealed in its many diverse shapes, built in multiple times. This study begins with the ontological condition of architecture, which has been defined since ancient classics. Its starting point is the concept of project, as an essential tool to the knowledge and spatial organization, through which architecture acts in the mediation of contingent reality. The answers presented by architecture, especially since the 60's and the Italian school, made the importance of the idea of the city re-emerge, in the face of the questioning about the accelerated urban transformations of the post-war period. The attention to project and the need for its historical reading is emphasized by Rossi, Tafuri and Aureli. With different goals, these authors, respectively, decide on the project and the clarification of the conditions of its exercise, for the political project and for the formal project while also political. But essentially as a form to fight the contemporary processes of making the city, namely through urbanization. However, the city projectual reading is made from its shapes and spaces, besides its motivations, ideologies, apparatus and speeches that make each historical moment, in fact as Lefebvre and Foucault clarified. In the urgency of a thought about Guarda, the city is examined with the main goal of creating a place for thinking about its project, in its political while also formal dimension. Thus, the knowledge of the urban facts is provided, in relation to the social and power practices from which they emerge and re-emerge. Pursuing this goal, sustained by the instrumentality of history, without determinism, it seeks the justification, recognition and retroactive clarification of the shapes of the existing city. Thus, the research here presented is based on an analysis of the city over a long time, its evolution, consolidated in seven historical-spatial orders, from the Roman foundation of Guarda to the year 2010. In the search for the intelligibility of those times, the instrumentality of history and the utilization of a representation laboratory as design tools were decisive.

Keywords: Guarda; City; Architecture; Project; History; Representation Laboratory