Espaços de Sombra: Ensaio Projetual de um tanatório para o Porto

• Autor(a) principal: Rita Figueiredo Correia
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/123782
• topic: Artes; Arts

Death is an unavoidable event in life that needs a proper space for its celebration. Currently, the funeral home is the architectural approach to this need, providing a set of spaces for increasingly personal and symbolically expressive rituals. The present dissertation is the result of an investigation about the conception of a funeral home for the city of Porto. It stemmed from a relationship between two concepts: the mental construction of a space dedicated to celebrating the ritual of death, and the designed construction of a building capable of accommodating a program with very sensitive requirements, idealized as a singular concept which lives in the limbo between a crematorium, a cemetery and farewell spaces. Then, the proposal consists in the elaboration of a funeral home that opens to the landscape: a meeting place between the living and the dead. The various ways of dealing with the finality of life have left marks in the conception of the spaces of death, but in general, these have always been linked to religious institutions, a status which has recently been questioned by the increasing tendency of secularization of crematoriums and funeral homes. Nowadays, they present themselves as references of a space of death, which are associated with the emotional values and different identities of each society, rather than their religious values. Thus, the architect must reflect on these significant tensions and transformations over the last decades, designing strategies that aim to define an appropriate space according to the understanding of contemporary needs. Once the placement site is established, one can proceed to determining the projectual constraints, as supported by the study of the work of reference that has been chosen, in this instance: the Monchique Cemetery, in Guimarães, designed by a team of Portuguese architects in the 1990s. The articulation between the building's programmatic construction and the symbolic component is also developed, adopting the Uitzicht Crematorium in Belgium, designed by architect Souto de Moura in collaboration with the Belgian office SumProject, developed in the first decade of the 21st century, as a reference to answer the questions raised. The approach to the concepts of place and to the programmatic and symbolic construction is aimed at the search for translation of the approached concepts into architectural design, in an inseparable relationship between theory and practice. The architectural project is thus a way to graphically represent the issues thrown in the dissertation.