Models and drawings are privileged tools for understanding architecture: they display the physical form and expression of buildings. This exhibition brings together a group of models that, after having been exhibited in the past to represent works of architecture, were kept safe by the Centro Cultural de Belém. Like the constructed buildings themselves, whose forms they replicate in miniature, time has passed over them and left its marks. Twenty years since they were originally presented, they are now like treasures that show more than reflections of an era. Transformed into fragments, they offer evidence of the way society, at a certain moment, perceived architecture made in Portugal: sometimes exacerbating or diminishing differences between authors and schools, sometimes scrutinising or acknowledging new authors, sometimes forging the possibility of the existence of a Portuguese architectonic culture with its own specific qualities.
With the distance that only time allows, we see how the mythological construction of Portuguese Architecture reached its own limits. Its local specificity was in opposition to European culture’s great diversity of paths, movements and ideas. Legal frameworks, material conditions for construction, protocols of project management and control, labour, technical knowledge, and many other aspects converged. The mental framework of art history, upon which the discipline founded its own communication, has today expanded to encompass sociological, technological, political, digital and environmental dimensions. Models are insufficient for the comprehension of these dynamics, but as material vestiges of the past they confront us with the challenges of the present: How to think about architecture beyond its representation? How to understand its function in a world that never ceases to expand?
Title
Exhibition: Archaeological Fragments of Portuguese Architecture 1987–2006 at Garagem Sul until 30 January 2022Type
ExhibitionOrganizers
From
September 28, 2021 12:00 AMUntil
January 30, 2022 12:00 AMVenue
Garagem Sul, Centro Cultural de Belém, LisbonAddress