Spatial (Dis)continuities: project and narratives

In Porto, since the nineteenth century, the deficit housing situations involved mostly the “islands”, known as “old problem of the city”, whose construction intensified throughout the twentieth century, extending to neighboring cities. It was then necessary to design an apartment buildings group to relocate families from the Matosinhos “islands”.

In the “island”, where dilute the borders between the housing interior and the exterior collective corridor, the intermediate spaces increase the sociability and the community experiences are protagonists.

The grant process required thus to reflect about the space, linking it to sense of community that has achieved successive generations of residents, throughout several years (Fernandes, 2004, p.17). Then, we remember that habitus update time, as Pierre Bourdieu, becomes longer when socials groups have low income. To think the project, recognizing the community to relocate, implied to consider the dwell in collective, involving the family mobility now, from the city consolidated to new urban territories, where the open space will persist as a factor of development and often impressed with an ambiguous character. Ambiguous, by the “vagueness, uncertainly, doubt / indecision (from lat. Ambiguitas, ãtis)” as Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa Contemporânea, because the open spaces were changing its meaning, with a participation, not always clear, in the structure of development of urban areas. “In a multifaceted reality, the architecture can create spaces more plural because, precisely, they are indeterminate. The old notion of identity becomes more ambiguous…” as Diccionario Metápolis de la Arquitextura Avançada.

In its stay, the notion of open space is associated with a notion of urbanity, as a value to protect. In the time, the same question will subsist: how to consider today this open space? Undone the naiveté or demiurgic postures, will have to accept the challenges from territory that we have, taking of this the project premises.

With the possibility to `rearrange´ a parcel of territory, we remember Portas: “deal the topic of the space that is not built is sign of the times” (Portas, 1986, n.p.). In an urban (dis)continuity environment, the `open space´ becomes reference, with the possibility to think a new order, involving the participation of the spaces `between-two´. Here we have as reference the spatial and an architectonic device that allows the spatial inter-relation, and inter-relate is “to establish some relation or link between two or more elements, in a way that one affects the other.

Has itself the term `transit´, which can be synonymous “act of walking and changing of place or becomes flux” (Delgado, 2004, p.35). The design of the urban structures is linked to dislocation, and the contemporary territory transformation is linked to the mobility forms, associated with the new spatial practices of the dwell - (from lat. Habitãre): “live in a certain place or region, to be resident; Habitat (from lat. Habitat, 3rd singular present tense person. From Habitãre): a set of conditions related with the place where you dwell or live, or with the dwelling “, according to the previous source”.

The open space participates in a system where the channel is “principle of urban dynamics, that materialize among parts of city” (Ratouis, Marriére and Dieudonne, 1997, p.143). There is talk about urban space, movement and flows, including here the person and the his relationship with the `street´, where “the worlds overlap and confuse, allowing go from one universe to other one” (Garcias, Tretell and Treutell, 1997, p.97). These are spaces and uses, and duplicity of behavior - pause and mobility - which has motivated the reflection about the space e how can, or cannot, influence the behaviors of those who dwell, “since the anchoring spatial until the drift of the flanéur” (Clavel, 2002, p.78). In this way, how to increase the relation system that develops between the open space and the built, materialized in an apartment building group?

Here we consider then the unit of block, according to the possibility of favor a collective identity and the intensity of experiences of a community, inscribing in two moments, “the local community, sociological unit strongly structured, and the set of communities, simple place of the “dwell of the other” (Clavel, 2002, p.74). The possibility of constituting an environment where the habitation and the surrounding, closer or farther away, will can integrate of articulated way a system of connections. We remember as Portas refers the “role of the block” (Portas, 1986, n.p.) in the new urban composition - the plan of the masses and the isolated - or even green, referring the public garden, the private street and the respective separation, which is now essentially solved in quantity terms. In this context, and despite the need to define typologies of dwelling, we focus more intensely in the open space theme and, in particular, the intermediate space notion.

From this set of questions, and it linking the answer and the previous program of needs, the objective is defining relations between the space of intimacy and exterior world, questioning the condition of insertion and the urban regeneration possibilities. The `door´ is the device that allows access to place of intimacy and, in principle, the facade or plan where it inserts, defining a border between the interior and exterior, private and public. But this dialectic implies spatial contiguities and `(dis)continuities´ - “the constitutive and diacritical importance of the neighborhoods” (Bell-Riz, 1997, p.51) - that will can polarize and induce mobility and/or sociability practices, implying an approach to the idea of limit - between-two and articulation´s forms - and to its materiality. In the mediation context and through a system of interdependences. According to Gausa:

'The intermediate positions are all over the meeting, across the surface boundary, across the geometric place where they are two different mediums, two different states of the matter, two different places, at least two different functions' (Gausa, 2001, p.343, our translation).

Parallel to the fluidity concept, we have the effectiveness notion, because the problematic of contemporary `open space´ oscillates constantly among hierarchy, visibility and accessibility themes, in a continuum that prevails as space integrating factor. So, we approach concepts of structure, statute, degree of openness, accessibility and appropriation, in order to make approximations to volumetric and their relationship, to surfaces, to fences and to distances between types of built and within the open space.

Paradoxically, located among apartment buildings group, the open spaces have distanced from the inner of block notion but, at the same time, in the apartment buildings group organization “was prevailing the tendency to ignore relations with what is `exterior´ to it (Portas, 1986, n.p.). In a vast transport and flow networks, where distinguishes a new relation system among the buildings, “was weakened the limit of relationship between the interior space and exterior space” (Zandini, 2004, p.205). The `open space´, began to express a new organizational philosophy, with origins in space “of urban tradition, such as the street, the square or the housing, in its archetype condition, and through which the city searches the balance between the fullness and the emptiness, the public and the private” (Lévy, 2000, p.103).

In the case of an intervention to relocate families from 'islands', we have as reference the 'corridor of distribution', collective open space of domestic space extension that allowed stimulate a sense of community. Based on reading of the basic 'island' morphology, in connection with the observation of experiences in the quotidian, some design options are justified, about the architectural and space devices of collective use. About the 'block' unit concept, that designates a space urban fragment that allows exploring the 'identity' notion, and validating formal options associated to behaviors and practices of group. The “urban social space definition approaches block's territory, from neighborhood space to scale of the quotidian life and scale of the people” (Clavel, 2002, p.16). Thus, we have a definition of architectural and space devices, because “all the space implies a contiguity that implies to beyond itself, contiguity that participates in its own recognition” (Secchi, 1993, pp.5-9).

The project, in a design process of physical forms and architectural and space devices, is justified based in the concept of hybrid. Thus, the sense of passage, in the transition among scales, between public and private, between individual and collective, defines a series of connections, that embraces all the area of intervention.

The physical passage, in a context of flow and continuity, seems to motivate the meeting, even if incidental character, becoming scenario of sociability.

Housing Mount Espinho, 1995-2004[1]

Location of Mount Espinho, Leca da Palmeira, Matosinhos - Portugal.

Architectural design and coordination: : Ana Paula Petiz.

Contributors: Filipe Fontes, Joana Almendra, Filipe Silva, Márcio Rodrigues, Maria Ana Coutinho, Margarida Ramos, Pedro Gama, Hélder Ramos.

Program: 234 habitações em edifícios de habitação coletiva e equipamentos de apoio.

Phase 1 of construction: 108 habitações em edifícios de habitação coletiva e equipamentos de apoio.

[1] Work realized under PER - Programa Especial de Realojamento (Special Program of Relocation). PER appears in 1993, still in connection with the problems of urban and population growths of the 60's, as the first largely step of housing policies made after SAAL and April 25, 1974 Revolution.

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