Archives

  • Architectural Design as a Co-Creation Process
    No. 15 (2024)

    The central theme of JOELHO 15 is urban architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries, with a special focus on the way in which a project is revealed as a space for collective engagement. The processes of producing architecture and urban environments have always arisen from transformations brought about by the collective, i.e. by society. The city, moreover, is the space in which these changes are engraved in our collective memory, their origins embedded in cultural, social, economic-financial, and political phenomena, among others.

    The intense social and artistic movements that emerged from the political struggles of the 1960s spurred many European architects to seek new ways to conceive of the public as the ultimate consumers of architecture. Answers were sought to the challenges engendered by the urgent need to house urban populations who were living in precarious conditions; new paradigms for architectural education were being advanced; and the uses of public space in the city became a prominent concern. In response, architects were motivated to explore design practices that involved members of the public in the decision-making process, especially during certain of its stages. Architecture became more deeply embedded in human concerns. Nevertheless Giancarlo De Carlo’s pilot projects for Urbino and Terni, the housing programmes proposed by the Service of Local Ambulatory Support (Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local – SAAL), or Sherry R. Arnstein’s theoretical framework (“A Ladder of Citizen Participation”), among other contributions, created a legacy that architectural projects of the later 1980s and 1990s would abandon.1 This was mainly due to an emerging neoliberal political model, the emergence of the star system in architecture, and the limitations of such participatory processes.

    Today, political, sociocultural, economic, financial and, in particular, climate crises pervade the five continents to varying degrees. This has reawakened a need to foster greater dialogue between those responsible for spatial planning—architects, urban planners, and landscape architects—and the publics, whether those who live, study, and work in a particular environment or its visitors. In this context, the promotion of urban regeneration processes is taking place both in the cities’ central areas, in which tourists and a new generation of citizens are welcomed, and in their outskirts, with the aspiration of offering better conditions for the local communities. In many of these processes, citizens are being invited to participate along with design technicians to develop solutions.

    This openness of the citizenry to participative processes of urban regeneration has brought about a growth in public awareness of the issues associated with social inclusion and climate change, such as the seventeen sustainable development objectives established by the UN (see https://sdgs.un.org/goals).

    Broadly speaking, participatory processes operate on the principle of combating inequalities and guaranteeing an inclusive life for all, as in the case of feminist, intersectional perspectives. The present-day practice of architecture is inherently linked to these global debates. As always, the city constitutes a privileged space where society’s intentions for the future are expressed.

    The artistic, social and technical dimensions of the architect’s work, which left a mark on 20th-century practices, have accordingly evolved to engage different forms of thought and knowledge, leading many architects to rethink their position towards the architectural project. In this revision of the architect’s role, it is now, more than ever, necessary to reflect on new epistemological and evolutionary aims, with attention to the ontological crisis of the city, as the low density of urban sprawl entails challenges to the city as an eminently political entity.

    JOELHO 15 explores whether citizen participation in the different stages of the design process has, or may have, tangible consequences for the way the city is projected and experienced.

     

    1 Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” JAIP, Vol. 35, no. 4 (July 1969): 216–224.

  • Digital Culture. What's Next?
    No. 14 (2023)

    We live in an era characterized by profound changes in the way we perceive and interact with the world, guided by the driving force of digital technologies, a phenomenon many authors have no hesitation in calling a Fourth Industrial Revolution. As diverse as these changes may be in the realm of architecture, they are inevitably embedded in a long-standing negotiation of formal codes, as suggested in Antoine Picon’s Digital Culture in Architecture (2010) and Mario Carpo’s The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011), ultimately leading Reinhold Martin to ask: “Is digital culture secular?”

    Despite the inevitable links with past codes, soft architecture technologies based on speculative intelligence are leaving behind what Nicholas Negroponte named “Soft Architecture Machines,” in which hardware still ruled, and opening a new era which is definitely distinct from the First or Second Machine Ages, as identified by Reyner Banham. Indeed, these digital changes are part of a deeper historical change. We are experiencing a growing political instability on a global scale, in which social inequality is increasing, while the worldwide urban population has surpassed the entire rural population. These phenomena have given rise to problems in urban policies, such as a lack of quality housing, social segregation, and the informal growth of cities. The evolving and nearly unavoidable phenomenon of climate change has been accompanied by a growing awareness of the effects of human activity on the planet and of the urgent need to achieve a measure of environmental sustainability. These changes all have direct consequences for the practice of architecture.

    After reflecting in issue 13 on how memory can act as a catalyst for architectural thinking within the singular mind of the creative individual, the particular interest of Joelho – Journal of Architectural Culture #14 is in how shared and collaborative processes, driven by the architect operating within this digital culture, are motivating experimental architectural and urban practices that are attempting to confront the associated political, environmental, and social concerns. Apart from the digital turn advanced by a rhetoric founded on aesthetic novelty or on innovative, conceptual ways of making, the undeniable strength of digital tools resides in how, and by what means, they might contribute to a more environmentally, politically and socially responsible architectural practice.

  • Memory, Memorabilia and the Making
    No. 13 (2022)

    In the new time consciousness of modernity, Jürgen Habermas tells us, historical memory gives place to an ahistorical use of the past, which explains the abstract language of avant-garde aesthetics. Suffice to think of authors such as Picasso and Le Corbusier and in the relationships their work establishes with the past. In their collections particulières, memorabilia ranged from vernacular to primitive and classical artefacts, the operative value of which rested in their aesthetic qualities, independently of their place in the continuum of history. The past was a source of raw material, opening new conceptual and morphological paths in the subversive processes of creation. As structuralists would put it, the past provided them with signs to be implicated in new sign structures, constructing new meanings.

    Exhausted the impulse of modernity and the post-modernist collage of historical iconography, how do architects use the past in defining new aesthetic paths? In today’s image-based culture, what operative role does memorabilia play in the processes of architectural creation, be it in morphological or in conceptual terms? How does memorabilia, and memory in general, act as a catalyst for artistic thinking?

    In a time when architectural design is increasingly subjected to building regulations, restricting its freedom as a creative act, Joelho - Journal of Architectural Culture is particularly interested in the operative role of memory in the creative processes of architectural design.

  • Archaeology, Landscape, Architecture: Crossings of Reciprocal Learnings
    No. 11-12 (2021)

    JOELHO 11-12

    Archaeology, Landscape, Architecture: Crossings of Reciprocal Learnings

    Guest Editors: Alessandra Capuano, Domenico Palombi, Konstantina Demiri, Paulo Providência

     

    Archaeological sites have been considered as places of memory preservation and celebration of a past – settlements of communities and migrations of ethnic groups, cultural exchanges between communities, religious movements and their progress in the territory, and the processes of territorial domination, among others.
    An interdisciplinary interpretation of these topoi crosses geological, historical, material, environmental, architectural and landscape studies, and allows us to rethink their interaction with the contemporary territory and the preservation of the signs of the past. That is, it allows us to think of these places and sites as potential levers of social, cultural and economic development of the societies that preserve them.
    Places located outside of great touristic attractions, generally placed in peripheral metropolitan locations or remote areas of the interior, or in some lost places on the coast, are particularly subject to difficult economic sustainability. In spite of their dimension, many of these sites are of great interest concerning cultural value, local appropriation and identity, and they may have a new role in local development, in difficult or even survival economies.
    The next issue of the journal Joelho is devoted to the crossings of reciprocal lessons in landscape, archaeology and architecture studies. It focuses on the disciplinary intersection and considers studies devoted to a reflection on the sustainability and conservation of peripheral archaeological sites. It takes into account the great threats involved in abandonment and degradation or that climate change implies (in particular on sites located on the shore of fragile coastline systems subject to collapse, changing seawater levels, river and stream flooding regimes, and forest fires). It also covers actions concerning the mitigation of threats to heritage (fences and walls, coverage and other protections, inclusion in contemporary developments of archaeological remains; run-off channels; forests, plantations of fire-fighting tree and plant species), tourist pressure on the shoreline and inland desertification (construction of accessible routes, logistic and informational support, cultural uses of archaeological findings), and alternative uses of agricultural intensive soil that may take advantage of other forms of plantations, including millennial fallow.
    We are particularly interested in the connections between archaeological landscapes and other types of landscape such as: infrastructural systems where contemporary intersections collide with ancient ones; productive landscapes (agrarian, fishing, extractive, industrial), considering not only the rich collection of landscape devices (paths, roads and bridges, centuriation and division of property, dams, dikes and canals), but also the irrigation and water systems (ancient baths, cisterns and rural domus); the canning industry (garum in the Iberian west, Mediterranean and south coasts); and mining and quarrying (iron, copper or gold, throughout the country). We value studies that are based on: the interpretation of archaeological sites and landscapes through mappings and cartographies, and the disciplinary crossing needed for mappings (geology, botany, topography, orography and history of settlements), as a way of knowing geographical, ecological, historical and social systems and its importance in
    preservation and visiting, integration and alteration; the use of design and narratives that connect directly with readings of the archaeological context, producing sites of higher cultural and social meaning, and reinforcing their economic resilience.
    At a time of strong, unsustainable consumerism with serious environmental consequences, the study and interpretation of the rich archaeological processes allows links between these places, marks and traces and the contemporary situation, thus demanding new design tools and processes. In support of a newly inaugurated European joint master’s degree among Portugal, Italy and Greece, dedicated to building a common language between archaeology, landscape studies and architecture, Joelho
    is interested in these archaeological landscapes because of their potential for learning about and rethinking the areas where the intersection of the past with the present can generate improved ways of interdisciplinar interaction – and therefore foster a qualified architectural design capable of integrating and conserving archaeological landscape environments with the use and life of societies.

  • Team 10: Debate and Media in Portugal and Spain
    No. 10 (2019)

    JOELHO 10

    Team 10: Debate and Media in Portugal and Spain

    Guest Editors: Nuno Correia, Pedro Baía, Carolina B. García Estévez

    This issue of JOELHO is published in association with the International Conference “Team Ten Farwest: Critical
    Revision of the Modern Movement in the Iberian Peninsula, 1953–1981”. For the preparation of this conference — held in Porto in November 2019, in the year that marks the 60th anniversary of the last CIAM meeting of Otterlo in 1959 — two preliminary meetings were held, where several contributions of Portuguese and Spanish academics were presented — in Guimarães, December 2017, and Barcelona, June 2018. Many different historiographical perspectives were centred on subjects like the protagonists, the processes, architectural works, urbanism, and representation — from anthropology to cinema, from pedagogy to research,
    from architectural language to theory, from housing to tourism, from image to criticism.
    After these two meetings, the guest editors of JOELHO challenged the academics interested in this subject —
    whether they had been in Guimarães and Barcelona, or not — to submit full papers that could contribute to deepen the knowledge about the means of diffusion of the ideas coming out of the Team 10 meetings, both in Portugal and Spain. Although not exclusively, the proposed articles could be focused on publications in all forms — architectural magazines, books, manifestos, television shows and documentaries; meetings, congresses and exhibitions; or individual personalities.
    All the papers here published result from that open call for papers.
    The title of this issue is composed by three moments of focus: Team 10 / Debate and Media / Portugal and
    Spain. The main focus addresses Team 10 as a group of architects who were dealing with the renovation process of Modern Architecture after the Second World War. Known as an informal group, Team 10 was however a platform of discussion, based on a complex network of several individual links with schools of architecture, architectural magazines, editors, writers and artists. That network is analysed in the second moment of focus. The last moment is a cultural and geographical one. In part because of their specific languages and political situations, Portugal and Spain were two countries geographically and culturally far from the centre of Europe. Although, despite that distance, there were many architects who managed to break this cultural detachment [...]

    Presentation Congress Team Ten FarWest, FAUP, Porto 29th November, 16.30
  • Cover

    Reuse of Modernist Buildings: pedagogy and profession
    No. 9 (2018)

    Reuse of Modernist Buildings: pedagogy and profession

    Invited editors: Michel Melenhorst, Gonçalo Canto Moniz, Paulo Providência

     

    Joelho 9 integrates a set of events organized in the frame of the European Erasmus Project, ‘Reuse of Modernist Buildings’ (RMB), where scholars and students develop new pedagogical and hands on methodologies to take the challenge of adapting the huge building stock produced in the 20th century.

    The educational research on the Reuse of Modernist Buildings will support the design of a
    new curriculum to train architects on the methods and tools on how to transform buildings and urban areas that were planned according to the modern concepts. To frame the pedagogical approach, Joelho presents and discusses the professional production that offers the best practices on RMB.

    The call for full papers opened Joelho to international contributions on the topic that give interesting scenarios on projects and pedagogies in different regions. These contributions were balanced with invited authors that presented their well- known proposals. This was only possible, due to the collaboration of several reviewers that supported the selection of the papers.

    Special thanks to Michel Melenhorst, the coordinator of the RMB project, and Paulo Providência our collegue, for the coordination of this outstanding issue, that in not only a theoretical reflection but also an operative tool.

    Joelho 9 also presents the 2nd RMB Workshop “Coimbra Modern City today: from functional buildings to community spaces” that joined students and teachers from five European schools in Coimbra during one week, April 2018, in the Santa-Clara-a- Nova Convent

    The Reuse of Modernist Buildings dialogues with the artistic approach of Miguel Palma, an inspiring reuse of images of modernist objects (cars, airplanes, boats, bridges) in provoking collages.

  • Cover Joelho #8

    Ideas and Practices for the European City
    No. 8 (2017)

    Guest Editors: José António Bandeirinha, Luís Miguel Correia, Nelson Mota

    Joelho #8 brings together contributions to discuss the European City as an idea and a project. In this issue, established and young scholars discuss the multiple facets of the European city as the vital locus for the historical processes that populate our imagination as urbanites. In three complementary parts - Discourses, Projects, and Reviews - Joelho 8 showcases a critical cross-section of ideas and practices for the European City developed over the last century. The articles included in this issue discuss several instances of the European city as a palimpsest, a physical and mental support where multiple historical phenomena are overlaid. Looking from different intellectual perspectives, Joelho 8 shows the European city as a place of coexistence, a stable, yet dynamic, organism against which the flow of time and the accumulation of experiences takes place. Joelho 8 allows us to travel in time, navigating through different aspects that have contributed to make the European city a cherished repository of collective memory and a shared cultural heritage.

  • Learning from Modern Utopias
    No. 7 (2016)

    Guest Editors: Armando Rabaça, Carlos Martins

    With the crisis of modernism, modernist utopias came to be seen as the cause of the fragmentation, suburbanization and dehumanization of the city and as a tool in the hands of real estate speculation. However, modernist utopias were critical visions committed to social, humanist and technical research for the improvement of living conditions in the industrialized city. On the one hand, one cannot deny the modernist attempts to reconcile the urban predicaments raised anew by the industrialization process and the creation of a new, post-industrial social condition. On the other hand, it can be argued that the problems the contemporary city has to deal with have much in common with those that gave rise to the modernist utopias: bigness and high density, circulation and traffic congestion, public health and social changes, cultural identity and technological development, capitalist profit and corporate power. It is therefore to be expected that links should be found between those utopias and contemporary strategies of urban design. The challenge launched by Joelho for this issue aims at exploring these links.

     

  • The Built Heritage Debate
    No. 6 (2015)

    Guest Editors: Jorge Figueira, Rui Lobo, Adelino Gonçalves, Gonçalo Canto Moniz

    PHI Network – Ibero-American Historic+Cultural Heritage, formed in 2010, is an international network that proposes strategic action, diagnosis, reflection and proposals on this common legacy, from the digital dissemination of research by students and professors. In 2015 the Department of Architecture of FCTUC organized the annual International Meeting of PHI Network, which took place in Coimbra from November 18th to the 20th. The event integrated an internal meeting of the Network and a public seminar that focused on the cultural diversity of perspectives related with heritage intervention, with the presence of teachers from the mentioned international and national universities. In this context, we decided to launch a call for papers dedicated to “The Question of Built Heritage” the results of which we publish now. Heritage rehabilitation / preservation / destruction, has become a central issue of our time. But what do we mean when we talk about heritage?

    The present issue of JOELHO publishes papers that address this matter in its many ramifications, from the identification of case studies, research methods and intervention practices, establishing forward-readings to this problem. The built heritage debate has no easy or obvious answers. This issue of JOELHO leaves the question open, through various contributions, where history and Latin American culture are the protagonists. The photo of José Maçãs de Carvalho, that makes the cover, represents this reflexive ability to look back at ourselves halfway through the leap.

  • Alberti Digital: tradition and innovation
    No. 5 (2014)

    Guest Editors: Gonçalo Canto Moniz, José P. Duarte, Mário Kruger

    Digital Alberti brings the architect who personalizes the architecture culture, Leon Battista Alberti, to the contemporaneity where the digital is one of its icons. Somehow, we think that Digital Alberti is also a good metaphor to Joelho and its role in the academic journals scene — a place where the classical and post modernist architectural culture meet. Digital Alberti and Joelho, as well as DARQ, are also together on the trends for a humanistic approach to architecture, combining design with an intellectual attitude.

  • Teaching through Design
    No. 4 (2013)

    Guest Editors: Paulo Providência, Gonçalo Canto Moniz

    Despite of what the name may lead one to believe, Architectural Design Studio teaching and learning is not a practical application (project) of a previous theory (architecture). It moves in a complex field that calls for implicit knowledge, personal experience, critical conscience, reflection-in-action, or operative synthesis, the Architectural Design Studio is a discipline of synthesis that resorts to social sciences, and as arts and humanities, or sciences and technologies, to build a transforming narrative argument. Albeit showing, a strong practical approach, its main goal is a theoretical construction of architecture. However, its theoretical efficacy is dependent upon its practical and instructive materialization.
    The main purpose of the Colloquium Teaching through Design was to debate the paths that have been scaned by the first and second study cycles of the Master in Architecture and anticipate the improvement of Design Studio education taking account of the following aspects: a) to identify design methods and experiences on design studio in Schools of Architecture; b) to define the role and contents of each design studio in bachelor, as well as master courses; c) to identify conceptual frameworks of design studio to establish learning outcome targets for each stage; d) to reflect on programmatic contents of architecture first and second level courses, their articulation and continuity whether for professional life or as third level programmes.

  • Viagem-Memória: Aprendizagens de Arquitectura
    No. 3 (2012)

    Guest Editors: Alexandre Alves Costa e Domingos Tavares

    O número 3 da revista JOELHO integra, de forma substancial, o registo do que foram algumas das iniciativas do Departamento de Arquitectura da Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra para comemorar os vinte anos da sua entrada em funcionamento pleno, o que teve lugar há cerca de dois anos, ao longo do ano lectivo 2009/2010. Não é fácil determinar uma data ou acontecimento preciso que determine o nascimento de uma escola como esta. Se o momento da ideia, o despacho reitoral com aval de ministro, a gestação embrionária ou o primeiro dia de aulas. A direcção do DARQ entendeu por bem escolher como referência aquele ano, homenageando o momento da chegada de Fernando Távora como referência à matriz de ensino que o nosso mestre em arquitectura e sempre lembrado professor das novas gerações. O projecto era promover três exposições no sentido de fixar três documentos capazes de fixar as referências pedogógicas que estão na origem do que é hoje a Escola de Coimbra. Infelizmente as circunstâncias não permitiram realizar a grande exposição didáctica da obra de Fernando Távora e só a parte do plano inicialmente elaborado que foi então possível concretizar, passa a estar aqui documentado.

    A reprodução integral dos paineis de duas exposições constitui o fulcro à volta do qual gira a conteúdo deste número de JOELHO. Mas, como revista que se quer imbuída de espírito científico e conta com uma comissão de avaliação de artigos submetidos a um “call for papers” sobre temas relacionados com os processos de ensino-aprendizagem da Arquitectura, onde a Viagem e a Memória constituiram motivações de investigação, publicam-se textos marcados pela diversidade de temas e pontos de vista dos respectivos autores, o que se espera possa contribuir para uma leitura mais aberta da problemática enunciada.

  • Intersecções: Antropologia e Arquitectura
    No. 2 (2011)

    Guest Editors: Paulo Providência, Sandra Xavier e Luís Quintais

    O presente número da revista Joelho edita as comunicações apresentadas no Colóquio Internacional “Intersecções: antropologia e arquitectura / Crisscrossing Anthropology and Architecture”, inserido nos Colóquios de Outono promovidos pela Reitora da Universidade de Coimbra, e que tiveram lugar no auditório da Reitoria, em duas sessões, nos dias 23 e 24 de Novembro de 2009; para além das comunicações, edita-se ainda o debate que decorreu após as sessões e um conjunto de comentários, realizados posteriormente, que enquadram e abrem perspectivas sobre o colóquio e suas comunicações. Os convites endereçados aos conferencistas, que naturalmente incluíam arquitectos e antropólogos, procurava o registo de duas práticas projectuais e etnográficas; uma, que poderemos designar de moderna, via na acção ou intervenção sobre o real o seu campo de acção; outra, que poderemos designar de crítica, procurava a desmontagem das apropriações recíprocas dos discursos; desta forma, os colóquios mais que um ponto de situação sobre a actualidade procuravam constituir-se como um ponto de partida, ou um ponto a partir do qual se poderia iniciar um debate sobre os cruzamentos disciplinares; o registo disso mesmo se poderá ler na transcrição dos debates que se seguiram à apresentação das comunicações.

  • Mulheres na Arquitectura
    No. 1 (2010)

    Guest Editor: Jorge Figueira

    O objectivo da JOELHO 1 - Mulheres na Arquitectura é constatar, analisar e comemorar a crescente presença da mulher na Universidade e, em particular, na disciplina de Arquitectura. Este é um facto público, e desenha uma nova ordem na prática disciplinar: a quantitativa e qualitativa presença da mulher poderá renovar a relação da arquitectura com a sociedade portuguesa no contexto contemporâneo?

    Sendo escasso o reconhecimento da mulher na história da arquitectura portuguesa, também por ser relativamente escassa a sua presença, constata-se a gradual alteração que tem ocorrido nos últimos anos. Este projecto tem como objectivo fazer uma recapitulação da presença da mulher na história da arquitectura do século XX; apresentar o trabalho de arquitectas recém-formadas como testemunho dessa presença e vitalidade; e debater a presença pública e a contribuição da mulher em diversas planos – arquitectura, história, crítica, investigação. Para lá da comunidade académica, este projecto visa também intervenientes e um público mais alargado, por abordar a questão do papel da mulher na sociedade contemporânea.