IJUP08 - Universidade do Porto

The Space of Intervals. The inner spaces of urban blocks: Space,
Landscape, City
Andreia Monteiro da Costa 1
Supervisor: Manuel Mendes, Architect
1
Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Portugal.
This research starts with the eyes of the traveller. A look vacant of history and pre-conceptions,
which produces an act of seeing bringing together, in the same instant, the past and the present.
The city grows further beyond the boundaries of institutions or masterplans and is without time
restrictions. In the atemporality of the urban phenomenon, this work wanted to consider the
city as a whole.
The investigation uses Porto and the inner space of its urban blocks as the enquire territories
for the research. Crossing ideas of several authors, such as Solà-Morales, Boeri, Joseph,
Delgado or Lefebvre, the study made trough their ideas observations of the present. These
were not made only through analysis, but the process of synthesis included both the
involuntary memory of Proust and the atemporality of Sansot. The methodology also
incorporated several other references from films and contemporary art, which helped both in
the understanding and in the production of descriptive metaphors.
This study produced a synthetic thinking, which, aiming for another legibility of the
metropolitan form could be more similar to the more inclusive everyday experience of the city.
Therefore, its intimate monuments build numerous personal networks of legibility, a kind of
multiple ectoponymy, which contribute naturally to the hypertextuality of the urban
phenomenon.
In this differential of identities, Deleuze shifts the active figure from the point to the interval:
“the interval takes all, the interval is substance”. So, in the city, the voids between different
individual meanings become permanent constructors of new significances, and perpetuate the
open essence of the urban organism. This study uses this notion of the interval to develop an
idea of needed fluctuations and creative misunderstandings to show the poorness of a city’s
legibility when based only on a closed common identity.
In Porto, the inner spaces of the urban blocks appear as territories where the city escapes from
its own institutional plan. In these territories, where rules are loose, the sense of place is built
based on different degrees of formality and liberty through the appropriation of urban space.
These define different modes of production of space that characterise the place and its physical
and non physical relations with users. According to the openness of Heidegger: “Building,
Dwelling, Thinking”; the performance of the discourse participates in this production of urban
space by changing these relationships.
In response to the lack of identity in our present urban spaces, this work tries to explore the
creation of the possibility of permeability as done by contemporary art. This permeability
allows spaces to better connect with their users, resulting in a stronger link between individuals
and their city through an erotic process of possession.
As Solà-Morales, this study claims the need of indefinite and unproductive spaces in a city. As
other spaces in other cities, these inner spaces of the urban blocks might work as expressions
of a kind of indetermination that is a factor of inclusion. Through their absences and
possibilities, these spaces absorb memories, multiple narratives and performances, offering the
indetermination of intervals towards more open and individual constructions of the city.
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