Advisor: João Masao Kamita
Dissertation: Heaviness and lightness: Presence, Body, and Memory for a Poetics of the Shelter
Defense date: 03/10/2016
Abstract
From an intuitive realization that the exhaustive search for meaning in
architecture has reached, in post-modernism, an instrumental fatigue, the work
sets to investigate the concept of “presence” in architecture according to the
debate established between Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton in the field
of architectural starting in the 1970’s. Frampton’s studies about tectonics and
critical regionalism, as a critical review of the supremacy of the scenographic in
the society of the spectacle in detriment of the experience of the sensitive body,
as well as Joseph Rykwert’s research on the notion of the “primitive shelter” in
the architectural historiography, offer a possible path to reaffirm presence as
defined by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: that is, the acknowledgement of architecture
as a certain poetics of building, embedded with a specific constructive culture,
within an anthropological view which takes body and space as ontological
dimensions of man and his environment. Architecture is molded between sky and
earth, where man builds his dwelling, suspended between an inherent and
oscillating desire to take flight and to sink in the ground, produce of a search for
an archetypal house transmitted by tradition in the ritual relation of this man with
his cosmology. The theoretical discussion establishes the conceptual basis for
the critical analysis of works by Lucio Costa, Lina Bo Bardi, and Paulo Mendes
da Rocha, in which one could identify, each in its own manner, a certain “notion”
of shelter that transcends the historic time in search of a mythical space of
building, dwelling, and thinking. Architectures in which tradition and modernity,
memory and imagination, body and thought, heaviness and lightness are
reunited in an eternal present.