Visibility

Visibility

UIA - Celebration of Cities International Competition 2003

National Award. Lisbon, Portugal
a|Um with Marta Caldeira

A|Um Studio’s UIA Celebration of Cities competition entry suggested that one could map a city to
identify places of delay or acceleration of urban activity over time and, through this map, locate
‘acupuncture’ points in the city to open up flows and networks, converting zones that might be
dangerous, arrested or frozen into areas of interaction.('Agent intellects: pattern as a form of thought', Architectural Design, September/October 2006, Wiley-Academy)

Cities should be nothing more or less than the great range of density of human desires, which are able to provoke constant creativity in others.
A healthy city - an ideal agglomeration - is a condition born and developed through both the concrete and suggested inventions of its inhabitants. All the participating agents in a city are immediate beneficiaries of its evolution and answer to time. In the same way, each contribution is unique and indispensable in the process of imagining ongoing change.

(source:http://www.aumstudio.org/)

Cities have several temporal ranges, areas of history that appear and disappear, dissipating in the structures which materialize as temporary or permanent wills. One of the most pertinent capacities in an urban nucleus resides in some of these non-permanent structures: that of the self-modification of meaning, that of the intelligent material.

The accommodation of activities made by the city does not summarize the city in itself: neither does it do justice to its complex body nor to its intelligent answer to time.

A syndrome of disease in a city is evidenced - taking different forms - when the main role of individual agent inside a collectivity is not allowed to its citizens. Examples may be found in all the conditions that emphasize only unilateral or dual understanding of the surrounding environment. The concept of marginality, for instance, is foreign, yet nevertheless accepted in an urban mode of thought which is inclusive and by nature is engaged with the reconceptualization of city edges.

This discussion of limits evokes not only what is exterior to the self but also the integral internal elements of the city body.

It becomes necessary to create new situations, devices, machines or organisms that advance our ability to render visible this individuality within the collective: a key ingredient of a fruitful enrichment in both cultural and human terms.

[PROCESS]
A grid made of different nodal points is placed over the city. New points are discovered in the middle areas between the points of great visibility - of one temporal understanding of the city – and the opposite temporal points; those individuals who reveal a profound distance between the sense of locality, and the insufficient recognition of their individuality by the urban nucleus.

(source:http://www.aumstudio.org/)

The grid proposes a temporal complement to the city. Where the city extends its temporal zone of activity twofold, the grid adds flexibility to that concept, establishing itself as an anchor or an inversion point. The grid points function in syncopation with their understanding of the rhythm of the city, thus establishing themselves as catalysts for different forms of temporality and spatial regeneration.

Nodes that exist in a marginal situation - in less safe areas, in less visible hours- establish their high visibility and their individual temporality, reinforcing relationships of connection with other temporalities, dissipating their initial condition as marginal concepts.

(source:http://www.aumstudio.org/)

The nodes are spaces of night life - present in the urban dream - they are anchoring points for passage of individuals in a limit situation, when the capacity of self-expression is lost inside the urban context. The visibility given by the proposed structures announces a situation of play, of stage, of rehearsal, of temporary exercise of wills and desires, while simultaneously being devoted to the service of showing and caring for that same self-expression of others. The structures go from uncharacterised points to bright spaces of invention: exhibition galleries of diverse themes, experimentation places, meeting points. These nodes will start to bind themselves to their intelligent behavior, that is, the way in which they construct themselves on a local level and then invent new articulations of their situation in this network.

Let day be night and night be day.

[Taken from the official site: http://www.aumstudio.org/]