Théorie et critique du projet BA6 (fala)

Topic, context, economies.

 

The aim of the semester is to propose alternatives forms of housing in conditions as close as possible to that of actual practice, and to make virtue out their concrete limitations. Low budgets and narrow-minded norms will become opportunities, all participating in shaping the possibility of something that could be called good housing.
The context of contemporary Portuguese public housing will be used to develop these proposals. Briefs and sites of competitions of the recent past are to be taken as starting points.

 

Multiplicity, ambition.

 

The semester will sail against the idea that an academic exercise has to be reductive, and that the complexities of the whole cannot be grasped at once by a project.
Through precise and multi-faceted projects, we will thus reduce to minimum the distances between what is good for each inhabitant, what is good for the neighbors, what is good for the urban setting, what is good according to the givens of a brief, what is good in terms of sustainability, in terms of affordability, in terms of beauty, in terms of construction, or in terms of the sensible distribution of spatial resources. Perhaps that the only unlimited and equally spread resource is architectural intelligence.

 

Housing as choreography. Housing as act.

 

No lens is ever neutral, passive, or objective. Starting from plans inevitably leads to a different project than doing it from collages or details. The way one furnishes or not a perspective is similarly charged with implications and meanings.
One of the objectives of the semester is to shape clear standpoints regarding this necessary state of failed objectivity. Throughout the development of the work, representation will problematized as a set of tools allowing to rethink the conditions of intelligibility of a given problem – here public housing. A wide array of so-called « modes of representation » will be experimented with, selected, used and distorted, according to specific intents, ultimately shaping the projects themselves and their focus.