Sobre as relações entre cidade, arquitectura e identidade: o caso da Avenida dos Aliados, no Porto

• Autor(a) principal: Carlos Eduardo Ramalho Guedes
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/147620
• topic: Artes; Arts

With this study, we intend to approach the mechanisms through which the formation of a communitarian identity came to be, shaped by a specific culture, and that materialized itself in the physical structure of the city over the centuries. We seek to understand the basic primordial factors, those closest to the elementary human needs - the physical as well as circumstantial ones, but specially the symbolic ones. We then try to understand the effects of that identitary imagery when its self-awareness is fully settled in a community, with the simplification and surperficialization of the images that it provokes. Once we have looked into these notions, we will seek to understand in what way they were important in the specific site in the city of Oporto where was tried to ostensibly create a new and defined centre, from scratch, communicating a renewed symbolic image with which the city intended to endow itself: The Aliados Avenue. Besides that, it is in the frontier between those gestures of an idealized identity and the unique characteristics of the old city looking to redefine itself that we intend to enlighten the difference between projected identity (mostly conscious) and effective identity (mostly unconscious). With that purpose, we will go through the itinerary of the choises and architectural influences that were made in the birth of the Aliados Avenue, seeking in those choises and in the architecture that came to be built there over the decades the signs of the identitary image that the citizens of Oporto wanted for their town. Finally, we will strive to understand how the recent self-awareness of a city's own identity - of its references and images - results in a superficial dealing of those images, making them conventionalized, goods to be sold and exchanged. We will see how that strong self-awareness of an unique identity, together with the incomprehension of its most profound mechanisms, can lead to a slow destruction of the references that made it come to be. In that sense, and going back to the Aliados Avenue, we will try to identify these problems in the transformations that the public space and its buildings underwent from its opening to the present day. In a last moment, we will reflect on the importance of the identity of the city, if it can either be understood and cultivated, or if it is merely another perspective among many others, with the possibility of being ignored without it being necessarily a mistake.