About the International Conference for the 5th issue of Sophia Journal

The International Conference on the 5th issue of Sophia Journal, which took place at FAUP, opened a new cycle of international forums, henceforth to be held annually, and taking up the theme and topics examined in Sophia for each year. Sophia Journal’s International Conference presented both a live and videoconference program organized by CEAU / FAUP, in partnership with UNIZAR and DECA / ID - U. Aveiro. The event was broadcast live online, encompassing a rich and diverse program: (i) a series of videoconferences; (ii) the roundtable launch and presentation of the 4th issue of the peer reviewed journal Sophia: “Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space through Photography and Image”; (iii) the presentations of articles of the 5th issue of Sophia Journal: “Visual Spaces of Change: Designing Interiority - shelter, shape, place, atmosphere”; (iv) the launch of the open call for papers for the 6th issue of Sophia Journal: “Visual Spaces Of Change: photographic documentation of environmental transformations”; (v) the announcement of the awards of the International Competition of Ideas: Exhibition and Mobile Projector and the Visual Spaces of Change exhibition, developed for this conference and for the spaces of FAUP, where new contemporary photography projects will be communicated, as well as a new exhibition structure that was awarded with the first prize in the International Competition of Ideas: Exhibition and Mobile Projector. The objective of these international forums is to promote the reflection and debate on the universes of Architecture, Art and Image, addressing various issues transversal to the worlds of Photography and Architecture, and exploring how the image can be a means to cross borders and shift boundaries between different disciplines. This event provided the opportunity to visit the exhibition of the Visual Spaces of Change Projects developed for this conference using FAUP’s interior and outdoor spaces, featuring novel projects in the new exhibition modular structure, which awarded the first prize to Sérgio Magalhães representing studium.creative studio. The Visual Spaces of Change research project proposes a visual communication strategy based on the development of contemporary photography projects that reflect upon different dynamics of urban change to open new horizons of public intervention in the public space. Wilfried Wang (UTSOA) O’Neil Ford Centennial Professor in Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin and Guest Editor of Issue #6 of Sophia journal: “Visual Spaces of Change: photographic documentation of environmental transformations” announced the open call for this 6th issue of Sophia journal. This issue will bring together photographers and researchers who make significant contributions to these discussions, including the material processes of creating, managing and interpreting sets of documents. We are interested in material processes where photography is explored as a significant research tool for critical and innovative views on architecture and urban transformation in their expanded fields and contextualized by larger systems: cultural, political, artistic, technical, and historical dimensions. Finally, some words about the published content in Sophia’s other sections besides the peer reviewed articles, with the former having been integrated into the journal’s structure as a way of enrichening the publication with diverse viewpoints from experts in the field and other types of readings apart from the articles from the call. [...]

The role of architecture in an engaging and meaningful experience of the physical exhibition

While recognising the part that digital media play in bringing about greater accessibility to artworks display and ensuring that they are more visible, this paper argues that the physical exhibition continues to be the primary place for the public to encounter the arts, as it can offer an engaging and meaningful aesthetic experience through which people can transcend their own existence. As such, it is essential to rethink now, in the scope of an increasing digital world, the exhibition in conceptual and methodological terms. For this purpose, the exhibition space must be considered as content rather than container and the exhibition as a work, often with the intentionality of a “total work of art”, rather than just a vehicle for exhibiting artworks and objects. Having the former purpose in mind, this paper proposes a re-reading of the exhibition designs of Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965), Franco Albini (1905–1977) and Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) in order to evaluate how their theory and practice can provide useful lessons for our contemporary thinking. The three architects, assuming the role of curators, use only the specific language of an exhibition and remix conventional modes of communication and architectural vocabulary, exploring the natural and artificial light, materials, layouts, surfaces and geometries in innovative ways. They considered the exhibition to be a work of art, overcoming the container/content dichotomy and trigging an intersubjective and self-reflective participation. Kiesler, Albini and Bo Bardi may all be considered visionaries of our time, as they offer a landscape that stimulates our curiosity through a multiplicity of information arranged in a multisensory way, allowing each visitor to discover associations between himself and his surroundings. None of them simply created an opportunity for distraction or entertainment. This perspective is all the more pertinent nowadays, as the processes of digitalising information and virtualising the real may well lead to the dematerialization of the physical experience of art. By drawing upon these historical examples, this paper seeks to contribute to current study on how an exhibition can stimulate the cognitive, emotional and spiritual intelligence of each visitor and clarify the importance of this effect in 21st century museums and society at large.

Des yeux qui ne voient pas

I must confess that – due to a broken foot – my enchantment with nature was somewhat faded. Staring at these photographs became an almost cathartic experience, serenity washing over in a dream, renewing a passion for the universe that created architecture and that, in turn, is recreated by it. If the Boa Nova Tea House were like Saramago’s stone raft, adrift in a vast ocean, then the Serralves Museum would be like one of Cesário Verde’s bucolic poems, bathed in idyllic foliage. From the very first page, one discovers the building romantically dressed in seasonal vegetation, enveloped in a curtain of greenery, which drapes leaves as floating water lilies and droplets of rain. Distant windows seem to emerge beyond the sumptuous filter, manipulating a type of picturesque nostalgia: the primitive longing for a Garden of Eden or the simple magic of a child playing outside. Having planted an oak tree in Serralves, this interpretation might be biased by my own boyish recollections or, perhaps, the landscape architect was just prone to episodes of refined apophenia. João Gomes da Silva was invited by Álvaro Siza to help mediate the relationship with Jacques Gréber’s 1932 designs, supposedly inspired by the geometries of Versailles. Having planted an oak tree in Serralves, this interpretation might be biased by my own boyish recollections or, perhaps, the landscape architect was just prone to episodes of refined apophenia. João Gomes da Silva was invited by Álvaro Siza to help mediate the relationship with Jacques Gréber’s 1932 designs, supposedly inspired by the geometries of Versailles. When Siza’s Alhambra project was exhibited here, in 2017, I pointed out that Gréber’s octagons and waterlines were connected to Granada – like those of Luis Barragán or Louis Kahn. In fact, all of Serralves can be viewed as a modern-day Alhambra and not because of its embellished gardens, protected by a stone wall, but because of its sequencing of spaces, of light and shade. [...]

In praise of light and shadows

The interaction of light and shadow has always fascinated architects, and even more so since Le Corbusier’s famous quote from 1923, published in Vers une Architecture, in which he describes architecture as “the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light”. This game, which thus motivated the painters of Purism and Cubism – among whom Le Corbusier would come to be included – contributed in great part to the definition of the aesthetic ideals of the artistic avant-garde in the West in the first half of the 20th century. Associated with the purity of crystal, with the idea of total transparency, and with the blurring of the boundaries between the interior and the exterior, this very same game served as the conceptual premise of (and later as a critical challenge to) the architecture of the Modern Movement. The counterpoint to the purist and crystalline impetus of modernism would emerge, and indeed one of many, by way of “In Praise of Shadows”, a reference to the book written in 1933 by Junichiro Tanizaki. In this work, the author examines how Oriental culture (in contrast with Western culture) has always sought to shield the interior space from the invasion of light and from exterior views by use of trees, porches, patios, shutters, and translucent sliding doors or dividers (the Japanese shôji). It is not by accident that many of these traditional elements would once again come to be adopted by Western architecture from the late 1950s onward in its search for vernacular values deriving from a broad variety of cultures. Having studied in these seminal years of critical review of the Modern Movement and coinciding with the publication of the Survey on Regional Architecture in Portugal – (Inquérito à Arquitetura Popular em Portugal) (1955-1961), the young architect Álvaro Siza learned from Fernando Távora – his former teacher and mentor – to appreciate not only the effect of light on forms (Távora himself admitted to being an avid admirer of Le Corbusier), but also to stroll about the shadows in traditional habitats (Távora would gather important teachings from Japanese architecture during his grand tour in 1960 and filtering it through another great influence of his: Frank Lloyd Wright). These different “phantom-characters” would come to also occupy the imagination of the young Siza, and to them he added references to Alvar Aalto, Bruno Taut or Adolf Loos, at the moment of considering the relationship between the individual and the collective space, between the domestic and the monumental scale, between the window and the city. The photographic work of Mark Durden and João Leal focusing on Álvaro Siza’s work in Porto – now published by Scopio Newspaper – goes in search of not only this same game of shadows upon the target surfaces of the façades and the interiors of the buildings but also the multiplicity of transparencies and penumbras that unfold through their ample glazed windows. [...]

Preserving heritage through new narratives

The following article describes the ongoing interior design project that accommodates a guesthouse in a historical building located in the city of Coimbra in Portugal. It focuses on the importance of generating new narratives to maintain the original nineteenth century building’s essence, when changing the architectural program, from a pharmacy on the ground floor and residences in the upper floors into a single guesthouse. We present the design-led methodology focused on the importance of generating narratives as a foundation to achieve a common goal while working in a cross-disciplinary team. In this context, the designer not only has the role of the form-giver, but also becomes the mediator between matter and form, the team leader, and the forecaster of the user’s emotional experiences. When adapting client’s brief into a tangible outcome within a team that crosses various areas of expertise (in this case: architecture, design, engineering, archaeology, conservation, and restoration), the importance of generating an open concept that can adapt to the evolving context, becomes key to meet client’s expectations. This article intends to contribute to the discussion of the designer’s elastic mindset as a binding tool between actors and contexts, towards an outcome that acknowledges the importance of the contribution of each one when looking for enriched results. Therefore, it questions what is gained and what is lost by setting aside the classic design fundamental principles and by focusing on design as a managing tool between data and the involved actors for an enriched outcome. As a main conclusion, it underlines the importance of generating a strong narrative with an open outcome to bind all stakeholders to a common goal through the designer as a project leader.

The need for Shelter Laugier, Ledoux, and Enlightenment’s shadows

The scope of this text is to think about how the human need for shelter began to appear as a foundational allegory for the discipline of architecture in the early modern age (XVIII - XIX), particularly in Laugier’s “Primitive Hut” of 1753 and Ledoux’s “L’Abri du Pauvre” of 1804. At roughly the same periods as these architects were investing the discipline with a new existential calling, new European visions of society, its organization and constraints were exploding the imaginary and concrete limits of the European polity which, at the time, was a planetary polity. Between Rousseau’s social contract, Kant’s Republic, Hegel’s “state,” among many other visions spanning from 1753 to 1804, Europe’s subjects, government and power, and their respective relationships, were structurally changed. Assembled in the same picture, these allegories and visions give us many possibilities of reflection about architecture’s new position and role within the political in the modern age. On the other hand, it may help us reflect on what architecture articulates in the outbreak of new social contexts. Heeding Walter Benjamin, we propose to take control of these memories, disparate and synchronic as they might “really have been,” to ask in a moment of danger: why doesn’t architecture shelter today? How can we read that foundational calling today?

About the book of Valerio Olgiati - Bas Princen

As editor of scopio Editions it is a great honour to be writing this closing text about the upcoming book which communicates our last Duelo/Dueto session of Architecture, Art and Image (AAI) series that had as invited authors Valerio Olgiati and Bas Princen. I will start by talking about the book as a privileged medium for Architecture, Art and Image and then go on focusing on this book in particular and its authors. This conference series had from the start planned a publication for each session with the contribution of the invited speakers and the organization because we believe that the physical book, without prejudice towards the potential of digital publications, is still a tool of paramount importance for preserving and building knowledge, not just for students and academics, but also for all professionals and non-scholars. The physical book somehow allows the understanding of what was discussed and debated in Duelo/Dueto sessions in a different manner, encouraging and giving the right time to each viewer for a deeper thinking. The reading of these sessions also means that these events of rich exchange of ideas and personal experience between significant authors coming from AAI universe are preserved for future studies. In this way, they can be shared with a larger audience, opening the mind of many to these events and encouraging critical thinking toward a vast horizon of issues related to AAI universe. It is worth referring also that the specific potential of the physical book as a unique medium to communicate Architecture, Art and Image1 was explored in this publication, which adds to its uniqueness and makes it more an author´s book than the customary conference or roundtable publication. It was possible to create a visual narrative where the sum is greater than the parts, which we believe has as a result an innovative reading and a more insightful understanding about the thoughts, work and artistic strategies of both authors. Thus, we believe that this book, the second of this series of four publications focused on each session, will foster a significant critical debate related to Architecture, Art and Image, as already happened with our first published book on this series. [...]

Light Catcher

Among his remarkable performance-based short films made in the garden of his family home, two films show the artist holding a mirror to both catch and reflect sunlight back to the camera and viewer. Such performances provide a fitting allegory for his relationship to the medium of photography. As a photographer Peter Finnemore is someone who catches and plays with light. Light is key to the pictures made in his home place in rural mid Wales, Gwendraeth House. The photographs relay the intimacy he has with his childhood home, which has been in his family for generations. Finnemore has been photographing his home for thirty years and his pictures are full of hints and suggestions, traces of those who live and lived there. With people’s passing, he is now its sole occupant and the house has become more and more a portrait of his own imagining, his dream space. Finnemore photographs feelingly and describes his home as “a dreaming centre to divine and survey the spaces between darkness and stars”. Working with black and white film and the chemical-based printing process his richly toned prints explore the opposition and gradations between non-light and light, negative and positive, with all their symbolic implications. Like film, the house and its rooms are seen as receptive and responsive spaces. In Dream Traces a partly decorated wall above a bed is animated both by the gestural traces of darker paint upon it and lighter rectangular areas where posters and pictures were once attached. The wall is not blank but a field of different energy forces, the slow photographic effect of the darkening of the wall around the absent pictures against the more immediate brushmarks of house paint at its edges. The wall is also suggestive of an awakening state, the sense of something not fully coming into consciousness. This is in contrast to the relative order and geometry introduced by the wooden bars of the bedstead and the clarity of the singing and piercing detail of the white dot at the centre of an eye, painted on glass. This Greek mati, used to ward off evil, becomes the focal point of this picture and cue to many objects and elements in his pictures that are felt to be imbued with energies and powers beyond their material form. [...]

The power of imagination

Fátima Pombo (FP) and Hans Thyge (HT) FP The motto of your Design Studio is that ‘it all starts with the power of imagination. Every design should tell a story, on its own and as part of a bigger context’. What is the meaning for you of such statement? HT Let me tell you a story that enlightens the meaning you are asking for. Many years back I was driving down to the Cologne furniture fair with two employees. We were driving late evening and started to discuss a new competition we were invited to take part of. It was about an ergonomic chair made of plywood for the contract market. In the night we discussed advantages and principles. After some talks back and forth, we suddenly discovered an interesting static principle, which could move the pivot point of the backrest up in the lumbar area. Immediately we felt that we had discovered something compelling while driving in the dark without pen and paper. The interesting thing was that we had elaborated an idea using our imagination and the spoken language even the matter was about three-dimensional form. The day after I flew to Poland after a long day at the fair, and I quickly sketched the principle down on the back of my ticket. The idea remained intact and worked after some experiments with prototypes. We often talk about “The power of imagination” which has become the motto of our small design studio. Design is about being able to imagine and sense stories and elements carried out in materials, with colours and surfaces. Theoretically there is no difference between writing a book, composing a piece of music or designing a chair. Whether it is the pencil or the very sophisticated 3D modelling programs we are using to elaborate our ideas, it always comes down to our ultimate ability to see and feel the object for our inner eye. Without that, designing becomes a superficial act dethatched from our personal life. A genius violinist once was asked where he got the ability to play so beautiful and he answered: “It is the sum of my life and all I see and experience everyday”. Our power of imagination is a sum of the cultural input we are experiencing, or in other words all which our senses see and feel through our life. It is not only the capability of playing the notes or designing a chair……the character and ingenuity of the expression is a matter of who we are, which will always be reflected in the things we create. [...]

About the 5th Number of Sophia, Visual Spaces of Change

To dwell and to build is not an art, is not a technique, but a realm where things belong. This is a statement addressed by Heidegger in Bauen Wohnen Denken, his text more connected with architecture that is more contemporary than ever. In effect, two questions as What is it to dwell? and How does building belong to dwelling? are intertwined with others like How to dwell in the current world? and How to give form to the quality of dwelling? The responses should point out again to Heideggerian’s line of thought: ‘Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build’. He pushes the argument to the limit adding that dwelling is to conciliate ‘earth’, ‘heaven’, ‘the mortals’ and ‘the gods’ (the divine). To dwell and to build should be the preservation of such square. It is remarkable that Heidegger’s writings on this topic, that stimulated and still stimulate the architectural debate, were strongly influenced by the philosopher’s life in the Schwarzwald, close to the village of Todtnauberg. In Heidegger’s Hut (Adam Scharr) the hut in which Heidegger lived in for five decades, since he ordered its construction in 1922, is described, as well as the bonds he created with the landscape and all environment. The hut was a place for him to dwell and to think, because both belong together and were mutually influencing body, feelings and sense of place. And if Norberg-Shulz left the phenomenological legacy of the genius loci as the spirit of the place, with its particular atmosphere and fundamental implications for building, genius loci within Heidegger’s thoughts on building, dwelling and thinking recall the sense of protection and of sacredness of a place like the one called home. Life in balance with the spirit of the place showed Heidegger that the emotional space is measured very differently from space measured mathematically. And to build and to dwell are activities with a significant order that resonates in mind, body and spirit. For phenomenology, place is not just the geographic or topographic location, but consists of effective elements such as materials, form, texture, colour, light, shadow playing together. The interdependence of all those elements, along with others allows the opportunity for some spaces, with identical functions, to express diverse architectural features and therefore countlessatmospheres to perceive, enjoy and cherish. ‘Sometimes I can almost feel a particular door handle in my hand, a piece of metal shaped like the back of a spoon. I used to take hold of it when I went into my aunt’s garden. That door handle still seems to me like a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells. I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase, I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen, the only really brightly lit room in the house’, confesses Peter Zumthor. On the shoulders of these inspiring ideas and experiences, the plot for the 5th number of Sophia was designed. It called original articles that discuss the core of interiority in architecture as a matter open to diverse ideas and practices in the realm of built space to be experienced by its dwellers. Interiority to be argued as a dimension that differentiates a place of a non-place. The non-places are spots with which the individual does not create any relation; they are transit- places without memory, identity, history, personal construction, references, emotions of which solace is not a minor one. Interiority claims that kind of space that accommodates thoughts, dreams, nightmares, intimacy, changes, silence, noise, neurosis...life. Shelter, shape, place, atmosphere portray scenarios that enhance experiences, events, occurrences beyond the functionalistic rhetoric enveloping them. All the texts that compose this issue display the strong insights the authors chose to approach the proposed topic. They trigger new thoughts and new questions. Three articles and an interview appear as the hard core of this volume. Preserving heritage through new narratives: designing a guesthouse within a cross-disciplinary team from Pedro Bandeira Maia and Raul Pinto discusses a very demanding design program of transformation of an interior space from a former pharmacy to a guest house in a historical building from the nineteenth century. The article exposes the methodology followed by a cross disciplinary team debating the project’s narrative illustrated with very expressive images. The role of architecture in an engaging and meaningful experience of the physical exhibition from Bárbara Coutinho and Ana Tostões evolves from the main argument that the physical exhibition is the immediate way to encounter the arts in line with the phenomenological understanding of the aesthetic experience. It recalls the inspiring role of exhibition designs of Frederick Kiesler, Franco Albini and Lina Bo Bardi as examples to contrast with the growing process of digitalisation and dematerialisation of the involvement with art. Authors address then the reasons why for contemporary times it is important that an exhibition is designed to be a physical matter between spectators and art. The need for Shelter. Laugier, Ledoux, and Enlightenment’s shadows from Rui Aristides and José António Bandeirinha discourses about the human need for shelter as the essence that defines the discipline of architecture. This approach is developed within an historical framework, namely referring the legacy of Laugier and Ledoux intertwined with philosophical and political issues.Based upon these reasoning, the authors go further and tackle the architecture’s role regarding shelter in contemporary times. The interview The Power of Imagination made to Danish Designer Hans Thyge is an exciting journey to pertinent themes thought from the professional practice of a designer who after 30 years in design still believes in the use of a pencil and a paper to sketch and to imagine. ‘Interiors’ is central in this storytelling as a challenge to create spatial experiences and staging atmospheres. Also his own house, designed by him, is a key moment to make special considerations regarding dwelling and building. We are very thankful for authors’ contributions and vivid minds.