The duality of experiences between the island and Lisbon, and in its differentiation of contexts, contributed to my experience of lightly touching the place, the slow, prolonged reading that has become essential to me, in a learning process. Visiting the place “at sun rise”, capturing its precious profiles. The physical support gains contours and highlights the “Living Geography” (2), as Gonçalo Byrne aptly refers to it. It adds the value of history, the layers of time in this very place.
Paulo David
Paulo David’s work has been internationally recognised for many years now, as evidenced by publications and awards such as the Alvar Aalto Medal (2012), one of the most important prizes in the field of architecture
Paulo David’s relationship with the Politecnico began almost a decade ago, at the Mantua campus, where he first arrived in 2016. Eduardo Souto de Moura was beginning his work as a professor at the Politecnico, strongly promoted by Federico Bucci, and had gathered a few younger Portuguese architects to support him, including Paulo David. Souto de Moura’s presence in Mantua, on the Master’s course in Architectural Design and History, was fundamental in giving identity and quality to the relationship between design, history and the city, but also in consolidating a lasting link with Portuguese architecture and bringing its research to the Politecnico.
The relationship with the landscape is fundamental to Paulo David’s research, it appears in the writings on his work, in the element of his architecture
His architecture stems from a deep connection with the island of Madeira and the tradition of Portuguese architecture, which has always been a topographical architecture, which starts by constructing the place. But this continuity also involves a different and personal dimension that makes his research unique, intense and personal.
The work we have chosen to present in this exhibition is one of the most famous and emblematic of Paulo David’s work, the Casa das Mudas, built in Madeira in 2004. A cultural centre dedicated to contemporary art located on a cliff overlooking the town of Calhea and facing the sea. Its layout is based on the simple geometries of the square and the rectangle, but then articulates into more complex forms through rotations and excavations, erosions and fractures that adapt the figure to the site, making its relationship with the context natural.
An architecture that is built in plan, but even more in section, that explores the complexity of the interior space, the relationship with natural light and between inside and outside. In this way, the building is placed in the landscape and becomes part of it.
The relationship between artifact and nature is the theme the project addresses, exploring their proximity and distance. A theme that immediately links it to its context, Madeira, an island-volcano transformed by time, sculpted by the sea and the wind, but also by man who - reusing the same basalt, the volcanic rock that makes up the island - has built terraces, paths, places to live, architectures built to endure. Paulo David’s project explores the boundary between landscape and construction, between the place that generates architecture and the architecture that constructs the place. In this sense, his work becomes complex, resonant and timeless.
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Poster
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