Master's Projects

Comunidade e Ecotopia. Restituição vivencial a partir da ruína do Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Maceira Dão

(February 2021 - February 2023)

Mentee: Sílvia Alexandra Ferreira Rodrigues

Supervisor: Daniel Santos de Jesus, Jorge Firmino Nunes

A reflection is suggested - figured below as an architectural project - about the need to reinvent a way of life capable of responding to the climatic, environmental, social and personal challenges in which the present circumstances imply us. The Monastery of Santa Maria de Maceira Dão, in Mangualde, welcomes a proposal for a sustainable residence, summoning the monastic experiential heritage through analogy with past practices of social, spiritual and environmental communion.
The project constitutes a compromise between three times: in view of a present that demands a transforming action, we base ourselves on the past capable of guaranteeing the confidence of knowledge and experience, and we challenge the future with the freedom of the project, to reopen the possibility of new experiential conceptions. Monasticism references the past basis for the consolidation of the perusal of a historical continuity, through the importance given to the conservation of the ruin, both in a material and analogical sense of appropriation, constituting itself as a reference in housing a multifunctional program. This will include spaces for meeting, socializing, training, cultivation and introspection spaces, which can host subsistence activities and coexistence in the place.
The ruin thus assumes the role of mediation between past memory - heritage of monasticism -, the current routine - programmatic skills necessary for the present occupation -, and the pretensions of future survival - both of the physical object and its symbolic or immaterial meannig. Associated with the reinterpretation of the vernacular house of Beira Alta, its rehabilitation becomes instrumental to achieve the idealized purposes.
Thus begins the utopian journey over an idealized scenario, based on memories of a place that has been abandoned, whose inscription in rural areas has always been historically translated as a paradigm of sustainability.

A caminho dum Êxodo Urbano. (Re)Imaginar o contexto rural de Pampilhosa da Serra para uma vivência sustentável e ecológica.

(September 2019 - suspended)

Mentee: Duarte Gonçalves

Supervisor: Daniel Santos de Jesus

This Master's Final Project aims to take a critical look at the context of living in large cities, to suggest a reoccupation of the rural interior of Portugal, which in turn is abandoned and deprived of character.

As a young adult and an architect in training, immersed in the raw urban reality, contemplating the absurdity of the status quo, I see myself with no prospects for a future compatible with the values with which I identify. The social and economic mechanisms that dictate the possibilities of contemporary living tend to limit the potential of human consciousness, moving us away from our own nature and from the biophysical context of which we are an integral part.

Thus, I take this work as an opportunity to imagine an alternative, a path to follow, based on pioneering projects in the field of ecology and sustainability.

I question habits and experiences considered normal that shape our presence in the environment in which we find ourselves, suggesting different notions of consumption and production, in order to create a fairer, more accessible and healthier context, having as a catalyst the search for quality of life.

The work then aims to establish a perspective based on the possibility of an inversion of the depopulation process characteristic of the interior of the country, imagining the scenario of an "Urban Exodus", studying the socioeconomic logics that facilitate such a process and the logics of housing and space occupation that are inherent to it.

These are applied to the context of the Pampilhosa da Serra council, which is in a precarious situation, especially after the devastating fires of 2017, whose municipal authorities were open to proposals for restructuring and revitalizing the territory.

A Memória do Lugar.

Reabilitar a Herdade do Rio Seco [Vila Nova da Baronia]

(September 2019 - September 2020)

Mentee: Ana Filipa Soares Nunes

Supervisor: José Duarte Gorjão Jorge, Lucinda Fonseca Correia

This project proposes a rehabilitation of Monte do Rio Seco [Vila Nova da Baronia, Alvito, Alentejo], where the themes of Rurality, Herdade (Estate) and Latifúndio (Latifundium) are addressed in relation to the particular case of Monte Alentejano.

The premises of this project are based on the study of the Place, in order to understand its past and history, preserving its Memory and respecting its Landscape.

The presented solutions are integrated within an architectural proposal appropriate to the cultural, geographic, physical, and biological characteristics as to not "hurt" the existing environment and buildings.

We propose to achieve a cultural mediation that allows the recovery of the native professions and trades of the region (mostly related to the primary sector), to pass them on to future generations and, thus, guarantee the integrated management of the Place’s heritage.

Habitação coletiva Eco-Social. O estudo ecológico da paisagem na resposta à problemática socioeconômica do 2º Torrão, Trafaria

(November 2018 - July 2019)

Orientando: Igor Prates Neves Fagundes Simões

Supervisor: Daniel Santos de Jesus

The present master's degree project proposal arises from the need to change the ways in which conventional contemporary architecture is exercised. Today's societies, in general, have long been implementing destructive and inconsequent processes in their operations. These practices cause negative impacts not only for the societies themselves but also for the ecosystem as a whole.

Informal occupations are marks of these harmful processes. Marginalized populations end up settling in sensitive areas of the territory and the precarious socioeconomic and ecological situations tend to worsen. It is clear that there is a conflict between the forms of human territory occupation and the capability of the biophysical contexts of these occupied spaces.

This work tries to conciliate the human needs and the needs of the ecosystem, focused on the territory occupation and a housing proposal, within the specific context of an informal settlement, the neighborhood of the 2nd Torrão, in Trafaria.

(Re)think the Village.

For a new idea of rurality. Project for the aldeia de Broas

(2017 - March 2019)

Orientando: Maria Teresa Valadares

Supervisor: José Duarte Gorjão Jorge, Daniel Santos de Jesus

The present proposal arises from the interest in rural architecture and consists of the study of an architectural design that offers a rural reoccupation.

Those who lived in the country were forced to go to live in the city. It is no longer necessary to resort to what the land provides, and what once identified the culture itself is today only a memory. It is necessary to reconstitute the memory of our culture in order to keep in mind the original identity of the places for a natural evolution of architecture and culture.

This work calls for a new attitude towards rural rehabilitation and reoccupation, implying a new approach to concentrated rural housing, where current repopulation programs should reflect on the new paradigm of return to the countryside, not only centered on nostalgic recreation of the past, but above all in a social and economic vision of inhabiting the land.

Ruralidades Alternativas. Contributos do projecto de arquitectura para uma restruturação dos modos de vida rurais na Aldeia Urzal, em Mafra

(2017 - March 2019)

Mentee: Mariana Ureña Prieto

Supervisor: Daniel Santos de Jesus, José Duarte Gorjão Jorge

The following work focuses on the future issues that can be traced from what survives of Portuguese villages without them having to resign themselves to becoming a simple escape for citizens, raising questions and presenting proposals to solve their problems, hinged with the great urban nucleus. The study will be circumscribed in an intervention area, with the main goal being the rehabilitation and revitalization of Urzal Village, which is part of the parish of Carvoeira, municipality of Mafra, district of Lisbon. It is intended to study the rural life way and its architecture, socio-economic and sociological structure of the place, landscape structure, among other issues, in order to understand the transformations in rural areas nowadays. Firstly, emphasize the main reasons for the non-territorial planning and building without articulation with the environment, leading to irreversible damage to the land's ornamentation and the inhabitant’s own conditions of well-being. On the other hand, an appropriate architectural proposal is suggested to restore local identity through a renewal of the village concept as well as the implementation of new functions based on local specificities, aiming to establish, if possible definitively, an ecological ethic in construction and conception.

Para uma arquitetura no lugar: Uma metodologia para o projeto do mosteiro de Nossa Senhora do Rosário

(November 2017)

Mentee: Vasco Amaro da Silva Horta

Supervisor: José Duarte Gorjão Jorge, Vítor Lopes dos Santos

The dissertation discusses the problem of architectural adequacy in relation to places. The practical section of the work focuses on the preliminary study to the new Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary, in Couço (Portugal), which is a part of the research project "Self-sufficient Architectures", hosted by Sustenta - Laboratory of Sustainable Project, Center for Research in Architecture, Urbanism and Design, Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon. The work intends to clarify the origins and different dimensions of architectural design inadequacy in relation to places. It underlines the major transformations for the dissolution of vernacular and traditional practices and the emergence of a predominant virtuality, which discards the specificities of places. In contrast, a set of criteria is proposed for adequate practice, considering the need for ecological ethics. Then, the previous criteria are applied in the design of place-specific building and climate design solutions and in the analysis of the preliminary study, namely the participatory processes with the monastic community.

Micro-Paisagem: Arquitetura como Nicho Ecológico.
Interpretação e aplicação do conceito de "Edifício-Vivo"
no Projeto de um Mosteiro no Montado de Sobreiro

(July 2017)

Mentee: Manuel da Gama Higgs Pereira Morgado

Supervisor: José Duarte Gorjão Jorge, Luís Augusto Rosmaninho

Studying the significance of this metaphor, we searched for its correspondence in the realms of Biology and Philosophy informing these ecologist design methods and their ethics. In this pursuit, we focus on a concept which might have a unique relevance for sustainability and even to understand Life itself and its architecture: the ecological niche as the living building's place.

The living building concept (Rosmaninho, 2012), arises by opposition to the modernist “machine for living in” (Le Corbusier, 1923). Other namesake concepts of the living building (McLennan, 2005, Armstrong 2012) echo the importance of this biocentric metaphor in describing an architectural approach rooted in a new regenerative, symbiotic and holistic development and sustainability paradigm, which has in the permaculture movement one of its finest examples.

The Niche Construction Theory argues that ecological inheritance is a fundamental factor for biological evolution and that ecological niche construction is an epigenetic evolutionary process in its own right. If Humanity’s architecture is one of the best examples of the impact of this process in a species' evolution, it surely is crucial to understand how a better knowledge of this biologically universal process could capacitate ways of life which are ecologically adapted, culturally adequated and technologically efficient.

Traditional ways of life find themselves also facing the challenges of this new paradigm. The Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary, where the Monks of Bethlehem dwell, is located among the Alentejo and Ribatejo regions of Portugal and conveys the experimental scenario where this process of eco-cultural niche construction shall unfold. Studying the pattern languages (Alexander, 1977) of the phenomenological ecology (Riegner, 1993) of the cork-oak montado forests, we try to conceive the micro-landscapes which might intertwine the vocation of this monastic community and its cloistered liturgy with this ecosystem’s patterns and the rural architectures implied in its existence.

MASTER'S PROJECTS