The Architecture Departments of Lusophone University of Lisbon and Oporto are organizing a organizingseminar – Architecture: Design and Research – for the current academic year.
This friday:
21 May 2021
14:30 (Lisbon Time)
Luís Urbano – “More than architecture. Researching in an architectural archive”
Please, feel invited to participate: Zoom (class): https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/84986977917
Synopsis
The ever-growing archives of the Marques da Silva Foundation, in Porto, hold the collections of over four dozen Portuguese architects and consist of an inexhaustible array of documents and objects that make up a valuable heritage and amount to much more than architecture. There you will find school exercises, architecture and urban planning projects, drawings, sketches, models, photographs, films, texts, publications, lectures, academic projects and theses, travel records from Portugal and abroad correspondence, libraries, art and literature collections, design objects, furniture and buildings. With the exhibition More than architecture, which involved extensive research, the Marques da Silva Foundation opened but a small fraction of its archives to the city with the greater goal of revealing the multifaceted universe of the featured architects, raising awareness and curiosity so that the collections can be studied by all.
Biographical Note
Luis Urbano (1972) graduated in Architecture from the University of Coimbra. He holds a PhD in Architecture from FAUP, where he began teaching in 1999. Since then, he has been lecturing and presenting in conferences and meetings, focusing on the intersections between Architecture and Cinema. On this subject, he has contributed with essays to academic journals and professional magazines. He has coordinated seminars, workshops, summer courses and the research project ‘Silent Rupture’. He has edited the books ‘Designing Light’ (2007); ‘Perfect World’ (2008), ‘Revolutions’ (2013) and ‘Circa 1963’ (2018) and has curated the exhibition ‘More than Architecture’ (2020). He is the editor of ‘JACK – Journal on Architecture and Cinema’, authored the book ‘Simple Stories’ (2013) and directed the short films on architecture ‘Sizígia’ (2012), ‘A Casa do Lado’ (2012), ‘ How to Design a House’ (2014) and ‘Abode’ (2019)’.
The Architecture Departments of Lusófona University of Lisbon and Oporto are organizing a seminar – Architecture: Design and Research – for the current academic year.
The lecture will illustrate recent and innovative methodologies developed in the field of conservation in order to support the process of sustainable reconversion of military heritage, with specific regards on the so-called ‘difficult’ heritage.
The first part of the lecture will be dedicated to an overview on European approaches, emerging from the 2017 Conference Military Landscapes, a future for Military Heritage’, with specific regards to XIX and XX century architecture, including bunkers.
We will see, as examples of good practices, some international research programmes, peculiar design interventions and institutional plans for protection and enhancements of military networks. From the international comparison, the vulnerability of this ‘difficult’ heritage clearly emerges, as well as the hope of a ‘possible and sustainable’ future, testified by some interesting examples – historicized and contemporary – of reuse of artefacts, of re-signification of places and reinterpretation of the military sites.
Then, we will look into the Italian situation and specifically on what we are doing with an important agreement signed between the Ministry of Defence and some academic institutions, including the University of Cagliari.
This synergy could provide a specific beneficial effect on reducing the so-called ‘time in between’, that is the time between the disposal and the reuse, characterized by a damaging abandonment or, even worse, by harmful occupations. Specifically, academic researchers can help in planning reconversion, showing feasibility – both financial and technical one – of new uses and defining guidelines to support professionals in their design activity.
Biographical Note
Donatella Rita Fiorino is Associate Professor of Restoration, member of the PhD College in Engineering and Architecture at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architecture Engineering (DICAAR) of the University of Cagliari. She is Engineer, PhD in Conservation of architectural Heritage, specialist in Restoration of Monuments, and she worked as an ‘Architect’ for the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Tourism (permanent position 2010-2018).
She has an extensive scientific production. Her studies cover a wide range of topics, but she has focused her studies on the recognition and analysis of military heritage, developing and testing innovative trans-scalar protocols of documentation and assessment of historical buildings for the identification of sustainable intervention for their redevelopment and reuse. She has also developed national and international projects and multidisciplinary researches, carried out with universities and public institutions, such as “Military Landscapes, a future for military heritage” (2017).
Since 2018 she has been the referent of the collaboration agreement signed between the Italian Ministry of Defense and the University of Cagliari for the activation of research and training programs aimed at the restoration, redevelopment and functional and performance adaptation of the historic buildings, including civil reconversions and “dual-use” scenarios. Parallel to the academic activity, she has constant and intense collaboration with the professional’s world and cultural associations (ASSIRCCO, ICOMOS member, Expert Member for Italy of ICOFORT, member of the National Scientific Council of the Italian Institute of Castles, member of SIRA – Italian Society of Architectural Restoration).
The Architecture Departments of Lusófona University of Lisbon and Oporto are organizing a seminar – Architecture: Design and Research – for the current academic year.
This friday:
14 May 2021 at 16:30 (Lisbon Time)
Nicolás Sica Palermo – Forma e Tectonicidade: Estrutura e Pré-fabricação na Obra de Gordon Bunshaft
The works of architect Gordon Bunshaft, developed during the time he worked at the S.O.M. – Skidmore, Owings & Merrill – group together a series of constructive and formal attributes that reflect modernity and the scope in which it reached its maximum artistic expression.
Lever House, completed in 1952, attracted fame and new customers to the company, becoming one of the paradigms for the design of modern office buildings. The evolution of the design and construction processes of S.O.M. they generated a considerable variety of formal solutions produced during the fifties. The company’s work structure was based on three basic aspects: modern architecture, North American organizational methods and the domain and development of available industrialized construction techniques and materials. Almost in the sixties, S.O.M. they started to have more expressive and technically refined resistant structures, enhancing formal attributes and acquiring more functions than the usual ones. The New York office, with Gordon Bunshaft at the helm, was the first to introduce precast concrete units into its designs, leading to most of the material’s later applications. The practice of Bunshaft and his team was, from the beginning,in the direction of exploring the material in resistant systems, always taking precedence over those experiments with steel structures that turned out to be successful.
In this context, buildings were constructed in which the structural system practically determines the resulting shape. The architect used in his projects with precast concrete elements basically two types of structures: perimeter reticular structures – vertical structural components that materialized in the buildings for the John Hancock Company in New Orleans and for the Lambert Bank in Brussels – and slabs unidirectional beams on continuous supports – horizontal structural components in buildings such as the American Can Company in Greenwich, the American Republic Company in Des Moines, and in the architect’s own home in East Hampton.
The economy of means and solutions adopted, the orderly repetition of these solutions and the precision in execution generate the visual and formal consistency of the buildings, which have as an undeniable characteristic feature a clear tectonicity. In addition to originating in structural systems composed of prefabricated concrete elements, the characteristic tectonicity in the architect’s work is also seen in the design of the pieces, in the way they are joined and in the finishes used on them.
As Bunshaft itself stated, “we adopted prefabrication and made it a design benefit”Nicolás Sica Palermo graduated in Architecture and Urbanism from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2004), Master in Architecture from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2006), Master in Theory and Practice of Architectural Projects – Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya ( 2008) and Doctorate in Architectural Projects – Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya (2012). He has experience in the field of Architecture and Urbanism, with an emphasis on Architectural Projects. He has been an adjunct professor and at the Faculty of Architecture at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul since 2014, and Head of the Department of Architecture at the same institution since 2020.
The Architecture Departments of Lusófona University of Lisbon and Oporto are organizing a seminar – Architecture: Design and Research – for the current academic year.
This friday
7 May 2021 at 16:30 (Lisbon Time)
Claudia Rueda – Habitar el paisaje de los “Los Jardines del Pedregal de San Ángel”
Please, see in attachment the Updated version of the main poster.
Synopsis
Los Jardines del Pedregal de San Ángel es una obra urbanística y paisajística cuyo artífice fue el arquitecto mexicano Luis Barragán. El proyectó habitar un paisaje originado por la erupción de el volcán Xitle: un mar de rocas volcánicas con una vegetación única. Las primeras casas fueron propuestas de Luis Barragán donde mostraba su idea de cómo habitar el Pedregal. En forma paralela el arquitecto Francisco Artigas proponía de manera distinta el diálogo entre el paisaje y el espacio construido.
Con el paso del tiempo varias generaciones de arquitectos proyectaron en ese lugar convirtiéndose en laboratorio formal de arquitectura moderna y cuya consigna en común era la salvaguarda del paisaje. La conferencia se divide en dos partes, la primera se explicar el proyecto urbano y paisajístico de Luis Barragán, la segunda se analiza la propuesta de Luis Barragán y Francisco Artigas.
Biographical Note
Arquitecta por el Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO), en 1998, se doctoró en Proyectos Arquitectónicos en la Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (UPC), en 2008. En la Escuela de Arquitectura La Salle Universidad Ramón Llull de Barcelona (España), ha sido profesora y coordinadora del área de investigación, de máster universitario y doctorado. Investigadora del Grupo IAM (Investigación de Arquitectura Mediterránea). Actualmente es profesora investigadora en el Departamento de Proyectos Arquitectónicos de la Universidad de Guadalajara, Miembro del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores Nivel II y Miembro de Docomomo México.
Su trabajo de investigación se centra en La arquitectura moderna en México, tránsitos entre América Latina y el Mediterráneo. Entre algunas de sus publicaciones más destacadas: colaboró en la colección de libros Documentos de la Arquitectura Moderna en América Latina 1950-1965, nominado a los premios CICA Awards en 2008; autora del libro “Una mirada ala modernidad arquitectónica en Guadalajara”, “Imágenes de la modernidad: arquitectura y ciudad” además de capítulos de libros, revistas y congresos. En forma paralela al trabajo docente ejerció la práctica profesional Barcelona y actualmente en México.
Gabriela Celani is an architect with a master’s degree from FAU-USP and a PhD from MIT, where she was supervised by William Mitchell and Terry Knight. Since 2004 she has been a researcher and professor of the Architecture and Urbanism course at Unicamp, where she created the Automation and Prototyping Laboratory for Architecture and Construction (LAPAC), and where she is currently a full professor. She works at undergraduate and graduate level, developing research in the areas of digital fabrication, design process automation, shape grammar and algorithmic-parametric design, across Architecture and Urbanism.
At Unicamp, she was an advisor to the Dean of Undergraduate Studies and the Dean and Project Director of the Exploratory Science Museum, and currently coordinates the Physical-Spatial component of the International Hub for Sustainable Development (HIDS) project. She is the author of the book CAD Criativo (Elsevier, 2003) and has translated the books The logic of architecture and The poetics of gardens into Portuguese. She was a visiting professor, with funding, at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Argentina), the Technical University of Lisbon and MIT. She was coordinator of projects financed by FAPESP, CAPES, FAEPEX and CNPq, involving national and foreign universities, such as Coimbra, Lisbon, Melbourne, Braunschweig and Kaiserslautern.
She is a member of the scientific committees of the Design Computing and Cognition, SIGraDi, eCAADe, CAADRIA, ASCAAD and CAAD Futures congresses. She was Vice President of SIGraDi and is currently Vice President of CAAD Futures. She was a guest speaker at the following events: Digital fabrication: a state of art (Lisbon, 2011), SIGraDi 2012 (Fortaleza), Sustainable Intelligent Manufacturing (Lisbon, 2013), Digital DArq (Coimbra, 2015) and SIGraDi/eCAADe congress 2019 (Porto ). She organized the conferences CAAD Futures 2015 (São Paulo) and BRAGFOST 2016 (Campinas). She received the Arturo Montagú (Sigradi, 2017) and Zeferino Vaz (Unicamp, 2018) awards for her academic career.
