PORTUGAL PAVILLION
Expo Dubai 2020 “Connecting minds, creating the future”: opportunities, sustainability and mobility.
“Space is a void, a pocket of air that must be contained to define a limit. This precision coincides with an indispensable existence around it,that grants identity. To design spaces is to design the possibilities of live, with limits made material. Space is defined by form, texture, color, temperatur, smell, light. Also ad a void, a mental process of control over construction where is at the core: adding subtraction, building excavation. It shift the center of experience from form to life. ” 1
In a world of continuous technological and scientific innovation, we can lost the identity of a place. Thinking about the future looking back: a way to get back to the origins. The idea want to propose archetypal forms to resume the traditional elements of building and living space. Portuguese culture is based on mass subtraction from a solid form: this “stereotomic” vision of architecture represents this idea of extreme synthesis (concept of excavation and cavity). The void as a physical space lived: “” Emptiness is measured, shaped and prepared to become a suitable view for urban events “2
The inhabited wall are the themes that make up the project, derived from an analysis of the identity of the place, the function in the present and in the past, and the contemporary need.
The central room wants to understand the spatiality of Portuguese culture: the house with a hut roof. “The roof” hut “, for example, has always been used to create a shelter, has become a symbolic form of building, that can to communicate through centuries the meaning of shelter and protection “.3
The pavilion wants to be a synthesis of identical architecture themes of spontaneous Portuguese architecture through the concept of the archetype. The plant is formed by an “inhabited” perimeter wall which includes administration and service functions, ( “to living the wall”, Luis Kahn) and one big central atrium, imagine of the patio of the Portuguese house, high and suggestive space.
Almost as a foot of a Portuguese village, the visitor finds himself living within the Portuguese home, lives the experience of vacuum. [...]” technical archetype, that constructive element or component (capitals, pediments, columns) which does not exist in itself, since it is not identifiable with the capital the partenon, with the pantheon pediment, or with the column of Marcello’s theater, but is “rebuildable” indirectly through the comparison of all the capitals, of all the pediments, of all the pillars, attributable in turn to an “lost” original.”
The pavillion would take place with prefabrication methods modularly mounted dry: the rooms (3 modules) as large pillar cables supporting the cover, that is is modular (3 types of pyramid trunks) and self-supporting, the big cover is clinged to a steel frame (ipe and reticular beams). The plan of the pavillion is made by an “inhabited” perimeter wall which includes administration and service functions, and one central atrium, as the patio of the Portuguese house, in which exposition is taking place. Also the service zones are modularity as the rhythm of the rooms of the typical Portuguese home: it opens outdoors with small holes, recreating an interesting internal space.
1 C. Tonon, L’ architettura di Aires Mateus.
2 F. Espuelas, Empty, Reflections on Space in Architecture
3 F. Espuelas, Il vuoto
4 G. Nardi, Percorsi di un pensiero progettuale
architect . vacuum
location . Dubai, United Arab Emirates
status .laboratory Design and Architecture Building Politecnico of Milan 2016
