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The Creviced City, Re-Tempering Urban Fissures and Fixings in Baixa

Part 2 Project 2014
David Clark
Rickie Cheung
 Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture | UK
‘The creviced city’ offers a possible solution to reverse the process of degeneration suffered by Lisbon’s city centre as the result of commercialisation, recession and suburbanisation. The project proposes a material urban strategy and a series of architectural programs – fissures and fixings - which are distributed across the downtown (Baixa) area of Lisbon. This strategy aims to revitalise and sustain the city at both micro and macro scales, thus reintroducing Baixa as a place to work and, most importantly, to live in. Asking what practices of “conservation” and “regeneration” mean in this context, the project finds that architecture should function not to reinforce accepted preconceptions and conventions, but instead to work with conditions of dislocation, uncertainty and to learn how to intervene in settings of ambiguity and flux.

Lisbon is read as a city of rich physical territory. The historical tremor of 1755 and the probability of a future earthquake remove certainties of the definition of ground in the city, and therefore Baixa is rendered a complex combination of stone, tile, rubble, displaced foundation, grid over meandering street trace. Through conceiving of Lisbon as a ‘creviced city’, its seemingly solid geo-urbanity is reconsidered. This ground holds the potential for moments of opening, opportunities to cut, and therefore insert, prop, traverse or occupy; to create a distinct architecture in itself, which is informed by strategies like carving, incising, slicing, weaving, wrapping.

At the macro scale, a consolidation of infrastructure seeks to reinforce the existing city fabric while easing the transition from arrival in the city (by ferry or train) to travel through the city (by metro, bus, tram, bicycle). A new transportation concourse is proposed. Within the existing buildings, a set of micro-programmes serve contemporary living and working: trades / crafts / services to sustain the city- metal and bike workshop, tram repair depot. These are administered by a new City Guild situated in the Praça do Comércio, located at the ‘mouth’ of Baixa. The City Guild connects artisan makers and Baixa infrastructure, while providing generous civic spaces for both the everyday and the unexpectedly fecund or disastrous.


Tutor(s)
2014
“Scarce had they set foot in the city ... when they perceived the earth to tremble under their feet, and saw the sea swell in the harbour, and dash to pieces the ships that were at anchor. The whirling flames and ashes covered the streets and public place
The capricious nature of Baixa’s geological condition (sand) is consolidated by anthropocene interventions. The pre-existed Roman occupation of Lisbon stabilised the ground through subterranean constructions.
Fissures of dereliction, unemployment, vandalism, suburbanisation
Baixa morphological analyses
Inventing through testing. A site model carved precisely by hand + accurately by laser cutter. Baixa as a site of flux, a site for interventions
Constructing crevices: architectural configurations generated by crevices + fractures + fissures
Anthropocene tracings of Praça do Comércio: articulated actions of the everyday from the past and present helped inform the propositon into Praça do Comércio
Baixa as archipelago: traces of the geological, past, present, future
Creviced city: transforming Praça do Comércio for contemporary trades + work + commute. A series of micro and macro architectural propositions.
Baixa metal workshop + local crafts shop + Baixa dwellings: transforming derelict buildings into spaces for contemporary trades + crafts + living
Baixa Guilhall + transportation interchange: spaces for contemporary trades, working + commuting
Sectional perspective view through the Guildhall: public/ private; thick/ thin; administrative/ civic; mercantile/ recreational; fecund/ disaster relief
Bespoke bicycle workshop + cafe. Programmes to stimulate contemporary living and working in Baixa.
Baixa tram depot. Programmes to stimulate contemporary living and working in Baixa.
A local market place in the prominent Praça do Commercio provides space and facilities for residents and tourists alike to interact, through local vendors, alongside a commodity exchange (historically the site of Lisbon’s stock exchange), for the trade an
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