Abstract

If there is a time with a particular experiential quality which is able to suspend the quotidian as support of obligations, behaviors, and recognition of roles and social aesthetics of the individual, that time is undoubtedly the night. The city as territory foments the construction of images, becoming the place of alterity. 
The “Architecture After Hours” research project intends to explore and define new concepts and techniques for data collection related to the narratives about the night and the urban promenades, namely its ethnographies.
The research team has been studying the different forms of urban spatial appropriation during nighttime, comparing with the significant aspects of human activity during daytime, in their cultural and social expressions.
It has also been discussed how the city image differs between night and day from the perception of the territory and the significations of the dwellers' environmental concepts, through day by day lived experience, as well as through the collective mental constructions of a more generalized nature.
At last, the team aims to determine the conditioning that the night use will impose on urban and architectural design in their institutional, symbolic and ephemeral expression, as well as delineate strategies for intervention in the night architectures with the purpose of exploring the creative possibilities of this representative space and possible ways of intervening in the management of the night activities in the urban space.

 

Development and/or results

In the future, this project intends to identify the particular aspects that mark human activity (nocturnal and diurnal) according to economic and cultural constraints; typify the city space uses through field observations and anthropological analysis; analyse the city image (nocturnal and diurnal) and the processes of spatial meaning in its environmental, experimental and symbolic dimensions; determine the use constraints associated with the human habitation; define intervention methods in urban space according to the ephemeral constructions of collective identities; and determine an “architecture after hours” and its creative potential assumed as a representation space. During the investigation were held the international seminars “A Cidade Não Adormece” and “The Paths of the Night”, as well as edited the resulting books.

 

Coordinator

José Duarte Gorjão Jorge

 

Team at CIAUD

• Arménio da Conceição Lopes

• Carlos Jorge Henriques Ferreira

• Daniel Maurício Santos de Jesus

• Isabel Maria Augusto de Sousa Rosa

• Joana Raquel de Sousa Bastos Malheiro

• Jorge Luís Firmino Nunes

• Ljiljana Cavic

• Maria Dulce Costa de Campos Loução

• Maria Manuela Ferreira Mendes

• Michel Toussaint Alves Pereira

• Miguel Rodrigues da Cruz

 

Team outside CIAUD

• Adriana Conceição Guimarães Veríssimo Serrão

• Ana Rita Ferreira

• Isabel Maria da Silva Marcos Bourhis

• Maria Regina Faia Martins Salvador

• Maria Filomena Marques

• Marina Moirika Reker

• Sebastião Almeida Santos.