porto project (2014-2015)
Porto and its two red lines
The
collective task of this unit is to perform acts of architectural research upon the city of Porto, using the relation of rooms+cities as a critical framework and the plan as our critical tool. Architectural design projects within the city + writing critical texts are our primary research methods. Accordingly, your main task this year is a
building project in Porto. The purpose of this trip to Porto is to find
project sites and sketch out initial site strategies. In order to direct this
task in a new and unfamiliar city, in a very short time, you will be asked to focus
on investigating and documenting specific aspects of the city and its rooms. Site selection,
program, and building design must reflect an understanding of the signs and
characteristics of Porto, and how the room in its many and varied forms and scales, erupts in the fabric of the city. Your design thinking and decisions must be imbedded
in the broader research project on Porto.
Lets make a wager
Lets
imagine that Porto is organised by two datums. One is defined by the concatenation: Avienda Dom
Alonso Henriques, Avienda Vimara Peres, Ponte Luis 1, Avienda Republica as it
cuts through the old city. The other is defined by Avienda da Boavista. It organises
the westward 19th C expansion of the city to the sea.
- Avienda Dom AH – a slightly composite [discontinuous?] line running north south, from the Vitoria neighbourhood in the north (San Beno train station and Aliados) until it disappears in Gaia.
- Avienda da Boavista – a single monumental line joining uptown Porto in the east (Siza, Bouça Housing at Metro Lapa) to the Atlantic ocean (Siza, Leça da Palmeira ocean swimming pool). It seems to peter out, to lose itself, in the Cedofeita neighbourhood of Porto.
The first datum appears most clearly in section, as a
single horizontal line chiseled through the summit of the old town, across the
upper road deck of the Ponte Luis, until becomes just an other road, in the town of Gaia. The
second datum appears as a plan form, the continuous strait line, a 19th
Century line.
Lets make another wager
If we can
use these data as a conceptual frame for organising Porto, we can understand
how to locate a new institutional building in Porto, a building that is either
a site for exchange or a site for representation.
Two tasks
You will be
divided into 4 teams of 2 to 4 students each. As a member of a group, you will
have two tasks in Porto. You will need to document these two data, to
understand how they function in the city of Porto; and you will need to find
sites and site strategies for your projects. The documentation of both should
be regarded as group projects.
Task 1 Proto investigation: the two datums
[east-west, north-south; plan, section]
Drawing on
your summer city plan analysis you are to investigate and document these two
datums through drawings, sketches, photographs, and analytic diagrams. You may
also use other media (film, models). Questions:
- Where does your chosen datum begin and end?
- Where are its rooms and how do they vary along the length of your datum?
- How does your datum organise the shape and structure of the city [rooms, buildings, spaces, fabric, events, geometry, the traces of what is not there, its inner and outer surfaces]?
- How does its function, characteristics, relation to context, etc. change along its length?
- What are the typical conditions along its length; what is atypical, exceptional; disruptive, other?
- What is its historical development?
- How does it order familiar urban dichotomies like big-little, public-private, city-region?
Task 2 The project site and project brief
You
need to find a site for an institutional building in Porto. You are asked to
find a site that has a relation to your datum and asked to be able to define
that relation. You are asked to think, in the first instance of the program (a script for inhabiting a room?) as
a site for exchange or representation, and think: exchange of what [ideas,
cattle…], representation of what and for who [political power, narratives,
history…]? You will need to think as creatively about brief selection as about
the site selection. Think how these concepts define space, a program,
a machine.
Your project is a room or series of rooms with a particular relation to the city.
Your project is a room or series of rooms with a particular relation to the city.
Teams – we will choose/assign in
class on Friday
- Team 1 – Avienda Dom AH – focus on the San Bento trains station and the tower just east of where the bridge springs.
- Team 2 – Avienda da Boavista – focus on Military hospital No.1, Casa da Musica, the Agramonte cemetery (also the Alvaro Siza Lapa housing is nearby).
- Team 3 – Avienda da Boavista – focus on the Souto de Moura Torre Burgo office development.
- Team 4 – Avienda da Boavista – focus on the anonymous commercial development with tower and multiplex aka ‘the strip’ [this team better read Learning from…].
Resources
Drop Box
In addition
to the plans and photographs in drop box, please also note
the
student-compiled guides to Alvaro Siza and to Porto/Lisbon architecture;
the Viva
Porto very detailed survey documents for the old town.
Internet
Mip
Web/portal de Informação Geográfica at
This site
is published by Porto Cãmara Municipal [= Porto Municipal Offices]. You will
find detailed plans of all of Porto, with turn off –able layers showing
historical data, trees, zoning, transport, and the like.
Figure-ground
format at http://sigweb.cm-porto.pt/mipweb/%28S%28vfbuuginmnjdmnul5vzqg155%29%29/MapViewer/SectionsViewer.aspx?id=0
Line
drawing format at http://sigweb.cm-porto.pt/mipweb/%28S%28m2k0yf55jnaedcfqn4x2f4ug%29%29/MapViewer/SectionsViewer.aspx?id=1
On my
laptop these pages load painfully slowly, but they have useful information.
Reading
As far as
we know, the definitive paper on exchange and representation has not yet been
written [is this a studio project?], but you might look at:
Kurt W Forster,
'Stagecraft and statecraft' in Oppositions (1977) pp63-87 [historical].
Kenneth
Frampton, 'The status of man and the status of his objects' in Labour, Work
and Architecture: collected essays on architecture and design (London:
Phaidon Press, 2002) pp25-43 [political].
Karl Marx, Capital:
a critical analysis of capitalist production (1887) (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1961) esp. chapter one, in which Marx defines the exchange value of
commodities [economic].
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics
(Dijon: les presses du reel, 2002) [aesthetics].
porto rooms (2013-2014)
What relation does a room in a city have to the
city?
How do rooms + cities cross with other oppositions:
·
private + public space?
·
inside + outside?
·
small + large?
·
intimate + distant?
·
space + (infra)structure?
All the rooms we have selected are to a degree ‘public’, all are embedded, physically and culturally in the city.
In each case,
you are confronted by a particular relationship(s) of an interior to a city.
Through drawings
and sketches, scaled plans and sections, 3D projections, perspectives,
photomontage:
Document the
room.
Document the
relation of the room to the city.
Tom/Hannah/Vivi : Hall of Nations (Stock Exchange) and/or S.Nicolau Baths & Wash house
(Paulo Providencia – you’ll find this in the 2G 20 book on Portuguese
Architecture)
Leod/Ben/Andrea : either
the internal staircase in the photography gallery or casa dos
vinte e quatro (fernando tavora)
Dan S./Ran Liu : Tiled Hall of Sao Bento Station and/or the hall of the Metro Sao Bento
Station (Siza)
Colin/Louise/Dan G : Bolhao MarketDecide between you what you will study and how you will do it - work as a team not as individuals.
The drawings you make will be exhibited alongside the completed 'summer rooms' in week 7.
No comments:
Post a Comment