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Atelier da Bouça
The act of considering the territory as something abstract and uniform where objects and activities can be placed freely is a risky process that produces superficial approaches to the places, favouring autonomous1 and preconceived schemes. We refuse to read the territory as an abstract space, over considering the richness of its places. The richness and complexity of the metaphor of Palimpsest, through its coherence with the Territory’s process of construction and its translation to a representation 2, sounds to us specially effective as a proposal of the interpretation possibilities of its writing sets with its inconstant levels of legibility, and the clarity with which it transmits a need for a special care as intervention in a finite and irreplaceable object.
We advocate that considering the “Territory as a Palimpsest” that one should decipher is a valuable contribute to a methodology of approaching a given project, objectively integrating in its premises, the information given by the site analysis.
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We are interested in cities and buildings which projects use and promote the legibility of its territory, projects that are inscribed in the Palimpsest allowing the reading in its various layers. We propose and exercise about the fist level of this inscription: the choosing of a site to be a place3
The motto is designing a camping site, a composition surrounding an empty gathering space of a community, the insertion of a collective space in the landscape. The exercise is divided in 4 moments:
Site analysis
the choosing of the place
Camp simulation
ephemeral occupation
Definition of the empty gathering space
structuring void
The synthesis of the gesture
the inscription of the place
The main theme is the economy of resources, concentrating various intentions in minimum elements, achieving the conformation of a void in the wilderness of the landscape:
The portuguese gesture is more gentle, but equally definitive. Less “build all”: What nature gives doesn’t need to be done. [...] There’s always a hillside to support the fragilities and arrogances of Architecture.
It is worth to re study this way of building. And it is urgent: intuition does not explain nor teaches Álvaro Siza4
The assignment doesn’t stop here, it composes an architectural exercise so essential that allows assembling references in different scales, from a room or a house to an urban plaza, as the studied strategies can be further applied in other contexts of project.
