Old and New Worlds
Perforated Horizon: Trace Atmospheres
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Peter P. Goché
Built in 1929, the metal granary manufactured by The Martin Steel Products in Mansfield, Ohio, is located a quarter mile west of Napier, Iowa. The building made a locally significant contribution to Iowa’s agricultural history as a rare-surviving corn drying facility. The facility is obsolete and has not been used since the 1970’s. Our goal here is to act on such circumstances with sincere sensitivity in collaboration with the extant building’s past and material presence in effort to conceive of a new occupation by which we might intensify its environmental scale and complexity and thereby re-occupy and meticulously inter-connect it and ourselves with its contemporary cultural context. The architectural intent is to preserve the historic building envelope and maintain the authenticity and atmospheric quality of this particular space by adopting it and caring for it in all aspects. Our goal for the interior is to retain the character-defining industrial features – concrete auger trench and floors, mono-skin perforated corrugated galvanized steel walls, and exposed structural steel. Into this, we installed a new tabernacle and ascent against a perforated view of the horizon. Drawing from pre-Columbian granaries, the tabernacle is situated overhead the lower landing of the stair assembly and consists of a shaped cedar wood mantel, piano tuning pegs and cast aluminum bladder in which to store grain. The ascent is a suspended steel plate stair assembly aligned with the concrete auger trench and leading to a single aperture through which to obtain a discrete view of the moon at nightfall.
Scales of Space and Time in Contemporary Landscape: Roman Land Records around Braga
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sandra Brito
These observations are the result of an ongoing PhD research in Architecture, which aims to understand the processes of landscape organization, over an extended period of time, focused on the relations established with the geomorphological structure of the territory. The research subject is the landscape around the city of Braga (in the northwest of Portugal), between rivers “Cávado” and “Ave”. In this paper part of the analysis of the spatial attributes of the centuriated landscape where the Roman city of Bracara Augusta came to settle is presented. The review starts with the formal aspects and the relations between the elements focused on the importance of the road network towards understanding of the new territory form. The observations are part of an architectural approach as the exercise of analyses is based on the project methodology. Settlement dynamics are therefore interpreted as the result of a spatialization process of relations established between people and the environment. The main gold is to understand the way the dynamics of preservation of the centuriation axes, associated to the retention of some paths related to the roman land records, help us think about the compositional relations in the contemporary territory. In this sense the interpretation of the Roman centuriation system may become the basis for the (re)establishment of relations that allow us to recover a given experience of time and space, which seems to us to be more adjusted to the narrative predisposition of landscape.
The Journey of the Tuna Boat Zargo: A Story of Space and Time
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gonçalo Rodrigues
This research is based on an overseas journey carried out for one year by the vessel Zargo (the first Portuguese unit built for an oceanic fleet dedicated to the tuna fishery) with the objective of exploring the Atlantic sea of the Portuguese colonies in 1968. The reconstitution of the trip arises from the testimony of two fishermen of the vessel and the found interviews given by the Captain. The research uses reports to design the spaces assembled by the journey, through a close deepening of what was experienced by the crew. Simultaneously, the voyage, allows for the understanding of time as one of the main agents of the spatial transformations. Thus, through spatial reports, one tries to understand the complexity of time in the lived place. In this way, the motion of Zargo reveals the life and the forms of inhabiting and working in the boat during a year. All the movements that make up the daily life are gathered together in a boat that continually glides over the uncertain surface of the sea.
From Modernism to Nationalism: Different Responses to the Political Context of the Portuguese Estado Novo
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eduardo Fernandes
One of the main characteristics of the generations of architects trained in Portugal, in the Schools of Fine Arts of Lisbon and Porto, before 1940, is the eclectic character of their architecture. The generality of the works built since 1925 (in this first wave of Portuguese architectural modernism) have the origins of their avant-garde character in this eclectic formation, in the face of an intuitive perception of the opportunity for formal experimentation created by the use of new construction materials, new programs, or new possibilities for articulating existing programs. Thus, the first works of Cristino da Silva (1896-1976), Cassiano Branco (1897-1970), Pardal Monteiro (1897-1957), Carlos Ramos (1897-1969), Cottinelli Telmo (1897-1948), Raul Rodrigues Lima (1909-80), Keil do Amaral (1910-75), Januário Godinho (1910-10) and Viana de Lima (1913-91), among others, denote a new plastic sensitivity of its authors. But this modernization of language does not prevent a subsequent change in the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s: in the work of the majority of the architects of the so-called ‘first modern generation’ there was an improbable transition from modern language to the dictates of the Estado Novo. Nevertheless, the analysis of this phenomenon must be done avoiding a generalization of the discourse, which being incorrect is also unfair for many of these actors; in this peculiar but very heterogeneous phenomenon, each case is a different case.
