Eighth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

This paper introduces a research-based practice developed with the architecture students of Urban Research Lab in the School of Architecture at the University of Minho. They were asked to do a reflection, represented with visual and textual media, on a loved space of their childhood: one where they belonged, where they may have laughed or cried, where they learned how to become a sentient being. Through these forty case studies, we have learned the extra-ordinariness of the ordinary, the incredible imagination of children to play with the “as found,” and to make it magical, to see the potential of simple things and their changing role both in space-time and in themselves. In a time when the fear of the unidentified other, increases the control and fragmentation of space into insurmountable frontiers, this paper reclaims the right to learn and play in every place: to freedom, to interaction, to know that now-here and then-there are co-existent. Taking as motto Aldo van Eyck’s statement: the role of “architecture is to build homecoming” (1963, p. 442), we think of space as a learning field with fields of hope and freedom to create oneself in the realm of generosity while learning to inhabit the in-between: this space and this space, this interior and this exterior, this school and this community, this community and this land-scape, below this tree.