On architecture as autobiography

From the understanding of an architecture that generates memory and depends on it, as well as from a collection that catalyses the project, the bestiaries of Smiljan Radic and Aldo Rossi are counterposed. The desire to fix a project approach, a memory and one's own identity is revealed — on architecture as autobiography.

MY BESTIARY In the context of the ongoing research (and necessarily enhanced by it) three projects are developed. As in a medieval bestiary of mythological creatures, the prototypes “Cobalt blue windbreaker”, “Actus Vulgare” and “Cabinet of polaroids” combine parts of different animals/ideas, improbable formalisations that would be inconceivable at first. I — COBALT BLUE WINDBREAKER At Homem do Leme beach different stimuli overlap: the freshness of the grass, the dry sand, the imprint of the sea. The intervention site has a natural amphitheater slope. To ensure its habitability it is necessary to provide it with protection and framing. A tensioned fabric structure founded by wooden stakes — archaic, portable, itinerant, — a beach windbreaker draws the limits of a natural theatre towards the sea. ıı — ACTUS VULGARE The Capelos Room is a noble, inaccessible and austere place. Like the plastic that covers and protects the sculptures at the Soares dos Reis Museum from dust, we proposed an installation, — a bubble. A new space within the existing one that could attenuate and blur the lines of ornament and a heavy hierarchy. The pavement is covered by a mirrored surface that duplicates the interior facades and the portraits of the kings in the same way that reflects the figure of the inhabitants of the room. Over the structure that supports the chandelier, a cloud is suspended blurring the boundaries, the realism of the portraits and bringing the human scale closer by modifying the rigid proportions of the space. The aim is a playful and gathering space of critical reflection (and irony) around heritage, especially about the way we protect it, “freezing” it in time. The sacralised space became accessible, its limits faded, its rigidity attenuated, — all set to an ACTUS VULGARE. ııı — CABINET OF PROTOTYPES Starting from the intuitive gesture of record-collect-organize, the aim was a collection of specimens that could carry a pattern of themes from prototype to prototype, from prototype to project.