"Mr. Valery": report on two experiences of mixed fields of research

Ponencia presentada a Session 1: Educación y arquitectura: fundamentos teóricos / Education and architecture: theoretical foundationsIn the last thirty years, there was a revolution in the way we work and teach, with the introduction and development of different ways of creating and manipulating digital images. Consequently, architects and students give representation more and more importance every passing year. This growing prominence of representation can be dangerous because it can lead us to think that a good project is the one that makes a good rendering. But the perfection of the render is many times hiding the deficient understanding of the problem presented by the client, the site and/or the program. To prevent this from happening, it is important that Studio classes are focused on the ideas behind the images. However, this evolution has a positive side too; induced by the digital paradigm, students can learn how to use another kind of architectural means of research in the process of design. They seem to easily acquire the skills to create images that explain the concepts, the ideas, rather than the actual form of the building that they are representing. So, architecture students can be taught to create and manipulate images that express ideas, as tools for interdisciplinary research that can be used outside the Studio, in other Curricular Units. In the work done for a Theory exercise, students can also develop methods of analytical research as a support for the communication of ideas. This paper will show two examples of the work done by Master students in classes of Studio and Theory of Architecture, trying to explain the specific objectives of each one and to summarize the results. The first one is from 2008-09 (Curricular Unit of Studio III, for second year students); it’s a practical exercise that aimed to simulate the relation between architect and client: on an existing site (located near the School), the students had to propose a house for the fictional character “Mr. Valery”, from the book with the same name by Gonçalo Tavares. In this book, Mr. Valery (a strange character, inspired in the philosopher Paul Valery) explains his ideas of the ideal holiday house. Confronted with this peculiar client, the students should try to design a holiday house responding to his demands, which had to be suitable to the site and also function like an (almost) normal house. The idea was to confront the student with the idiosyncrasies of a difficult client, but also to make them understand that it is possible to relate the architectural practice with the fields of literature and philosophy. The results showed unusual relations between site, form and function and led to many different approaches to a very common program. The second example is related to the first: in the next year, the same group of students attended Theory III (in the third year of the same course) and were asked to do a group exercise, in which two colleagues had to produce a critical analysis of a previous Studio work that they both shared, comparing their ideas on a paper and on a multimedia presentation. Many of them chose the “Mr. Valery” exercise, and their results were the most interesting: maybe because it was a small program, which was simple to compare, but also because it allowed a very clear discourse on the reasons for the project options, which sometimes were quite the opposite, in the two different proposals

Critical Eclecticism. The Way(s) of the Porto School

The term “Porto School” designates an identity that relates the pedagogy of a teaching institution with the ideas and the architectural practice of its professors and/or former students, resulting of the transmission (and update) of a way of thinking connected to a way of doing: a concern with social responsibility (perceived through the notions of collaboration and relationship with the context), a timeless concept of modernity, an intentional appropriation and miscegenation of models (in a process that we can call critical eclecticism), the belief that architecture should be considered figurative art (perceived in the pace of a promenade thoroughly controlled in time and space), a Vitruvian understanding of the education of the architects, the practice of manual drawing as a primary method of conception and the requirement of accuracy in the processes of work and communication

The construction of the Porto School

The expression ‘School of Porto’ implies an idea of Portuguese Architecture that began in the mid-fifties, in the work of Fernando Távora. In this text, we present an analysis of the Tennis Pavilion of Quinta da Conceição (1957) as an example of Távora’s tectonic shift of the 50s, inspired by the simultaneous influence of Portuguese vernacular construction and of the international debate. This work, along with the others which Távora designed in these years, marks the beginning of a new identity in Portuguese architecture.This work has the financial support of the Project Lab2PT - Landscapes, Heritage and Territory laboratory - AUR/04509 and FCT through national funds and when applicable of the FEDER co-financing, in the aim of the new partnership agreement PT2020 and COMPETE2020 - POCI 01 0145 FEDER 007528

The tectonic shift in Fernando Távora’s work in the post-Ciam years

Between 1955 and 1960 the Portuguese architect Fernando Távora (1923-2005) designed an important group of buildings: the municipal market of Vila da Feira, the house in Ofír, the tennis pavilion of Quinta da Conceição in Leça da Palmeira and the primary school of Cedro in Gaia. These buildings are landmarks in the history of Portuguese architecture; in their design, Távora employed traditional materials (stone, timber, tile) and reused vernacular construction techniques (bearing walls, wooden beams and pitched roofs) within a modern approach. This attitude is directly related to the results of the Surveys on Portuguese Vernacular Architecture, promoted by the Union of the Portuguese Architects between 1955 and 1960 and conducted by some of the most renowned Portuguese architects; Fernando Távora was responsible for the work in ‘Zone 1’ and learned how to recognize the presence of a certain kind of ‘modernity’ in the Vernacular Architecture of the north of the country. However, after 1960 his language changed and the direct influence of the vernacular began to be less obvious. In order to understand the evolution of his work at this time, it is important to remember that Távora was present at the main international architectural meetings, where he had the opportunity to contact the key names of the worldwide architectural community: he integrated the Portuguese representations present in the last CIAM Congresses and also participated in the Royaumont meeting of the Team Ten. Besides, in 1960 Távora made a three-month journey to the United States and participated in the World Design Conference in Japan. These international contacts and experiences were important to the rethinking of concepts that led to the different languages we can find in the buildings he designed after 1960.This work has the financial support of the Project Lab2PT - Landscapes, Heritage and Territory laboratory - AUR/04509 and FCT through national funds and when applicable of the FEDER co-financing, in the aim of the new partnership agreement PT2020 and COMPETE2020 - POCI 01 0145 FEDER 00752

From modernism to nationalism: different responses to the political context of the Portuguese Estado Novo

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.Este trabalho tem o apoio financeiro do Projeto Lab2PT- Laboratório de Paisagens, Património e Território - AUR/04509 e da FCT através de fundos nacionais e quando aplicável do cofinanciamento do FEDER, no âmbito dos novos acordos de parceria PT2020 e COMPETE 2020 – POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007528

The different fate of the Siza’s SAAL housing in Porto

The SAAL (Ambulatory Service of Local Support) was a national housing program created by Nuno Portas, Secretary of State of Housing and Urban Development, in June 1974 (only two months after the Portuguese revolution). It was a paradigmatic experience of Portuguese architecture, which implied an idea of participation of the future dwellers in the design decisions. From the point of view of architectural theory, the two works that Álvaro Siza designed in Porto in the context of the SAAL process (which contributed in a decisive way to the internationalization of his career) are a perfect case study of the processes of reuse / rehabilitation of modern buildings. Being two very different situations, both in their conception assumptions and in the recent rehabilitation processes that affected them, these works can allow students to problematize several issues, from different points of view. In the initial design, both the interventions were based on the idea of considering the traditional proletarian housing (the so-called ‘island’) as a formal model, while improving it with new meaning, dignity and comfort. Siza aimed to preserve the community qualities of this ancient housing scheme, but also its typological structure. However, while in S. Victor, the ‘new island’ appears in its traditional place, the interior of the block, invisible from the city, in Bouça, the SAAL housing disrupts the urban fabric and seeks to show itself to the city, proclaiming a new urban order that simultaneously rejects the traditional morphology of the urban space and the ‘Athens Charter’ doctrine. There are different lessons that can be learned from these cases in the subject of reuse: in Bouça, the recent rehabilitation and expansion process allowed Siza to complete his vision for the site, offering the city a neighborhood with a true inter-class community spirit; at the same time, the S. Vitor area was affected by a municipal intervention that demolished the preexisting walls which framed the SAAL housing, creating an open public space which expose the decay problems that affect the building. The paper will present a pedagogical approach, considering the good results of the rehabilitation process in Bouça as a counterpoint to the analysis of the current situation of S. Vitor, speculating on the way to intervene in a context were the answers are neither obvious nor easy.Este trabalho tem o apoio financeiro do Projeto Lab2PT- Laboratório de Paisagens, Património e Território - AUR/04509 e da FCT através de fundos nacionais e quando aplicável do cofinanciamento do FEDER, no âmbito dos novos acordos de parceria PT2020 e COMPETE 2020 – POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007528

Távora’s house in Ofír: Sustainability and vernacular knowledge

Although the widespread application of the term sustainability to architecture is relatively recent, the principles we associate to this concept are very ancient. For instance, in vernacular constructions, built without any conscious theoretical knowledge, we can find the practical application of many principles that are now considered essential in architecture sustainability. This paper aims to present Fernando Távora’s project for a holiday house in Ofír (1957/58) as an example of the way a modern architect, working in the mid-fifties of the 20th century, could learn from the lessons of sustainability presented by the vernacular culture of the north of Portugal, many years before. It is important to remember those lessons, because most of them are still valid, today.This work was financed by the Project Lab2PT – Landscapes, Heritage and Territory laboratory – UIDB/04509/2020 through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

Statistics, distillation, and ordering emergence in a two-dimensional stochastic model of particles in counterflowing streams

In this paper, we proposed a stochastic model which describes two species of particles moving in counterflow. The model generalizes the theoretical framework describing the transport in random systems since particles can work as mobile obstacles, whereas particles of one species move in opposite direction to the particles of the other species, or they can work as fixed obstacles remaining in their places during the time evolution. We conducted a detailed study about the statistics concerning the crossing time of particles, as well as the effects of the lateral transitions on the time required to the system reaches a state of complete geographic separation of species. The spatial effects of jamming were also studied by looking into the deformation of the concentration of particles in the two-dimensional corridor. Finally, we observed in our study the formation of patterns of lanes which reach the steady state regardless the initial conditions used for the evolution. A similar result is also observed in real experiments involving charged colloids motion and simulations of pedestrian dynamics based on Langevin equations, when periodic boundary conditions are considered (particles counterflow in a ring symmetry). The results obtained through Monte Carlo numerical simulations and numerical integrations are in good agreement with each other. However, differently from previous studies, the dynamics considered in this work is not Newton-based, and therefore, even artificial situations of self-propelled objects should be studied in this first-principle modeling.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figure

Patient reported areas in psychooncological counseling

Objective: We proposed to investigate the areas in psychooncological counseling that patients reported as causing the most distress, as well as the level of emotional distress cancer inflicts and it's relation to idiosyncratic variables. Method: A sample of fifty-one patients from Porto's IPO responded to a socio-demographic and clinical questionnaire, to the CORE-10, to the Distress Thermometer, and to an idiographic measure, the Simplified Personal Questionnaire (PQ). The therapists completed a questionnaire regarding their adherence to the PQ protocol. The data analysis consisted of assessing the patients emotional distress and thematically analyze the PQ. Results: The patients showed a high level of emotional distress regarding the problems described in the PQ. The main areas of issues patients indicate were Life Functioning, Anxiety and Depression. Conclusions: The psychosocial implications of the disease in the day-to-day functioning was the main area identified as a priority for counseling, which attests to the importance of focusing initial oncological counseling on helping patients overcome their limitations; Resumo: Áreas de aconselhamento psicooncológico reportadas por pacientes Objetivo: Propusemo-nos investigar as áreas de aconselhamento psicooncológico que os pacientes reportam como causadoras de maior sofrimento, bem como o nível de sofrimento emocional causado pelo cancro e a sua relação com variáveis idiossincráticas. Método: Uma amostra de cinquenta e um pacientes do IPO do Porto responderam a um questionário sociodemográfico e clínico, ao CORE-10, ao Termómetro de Sofrimento Emocional, e a uma medida ideográfica, o Simplified Personal Questionnaire (PQ). As terapeutas completaram um questionário de adesão ao protocolo do PQ. A análise dos dados consistiu na avaliação do sofrimento emocional dos pacientes e na análise temática do PQ. Resultados: Os pacientes apresentaram um alto nível de sofrimento emocional relativamente aos problemas descritos no PQ. As principais áreas de apoio indicadas pelos pacientes foram Funcionamento Vital, Ansiedade e Depressão. Conclusões: As implicações psicossociais da doença no dia-a-dia foi a principal área identificada como uma prioridade para o aconselhamento, o que atesta a importância de focar o aconselhamento oncológico inicial em ajudar os pacientes a superar as suas limitações