As long-time Lisbon inhabitants, perhaps we have never really looked at the buildings that shape us daily as the living entities that they are too. But what if we do, if we realise that they too have a before and an after. Where were they before they were? And where do they go when we abandon them?
This edition proposes an architectural journey to explain the birth, life, decline and rebirth of the buildings we inhabit, showing that if we look carefully, most of these buildings have already had several lives, several deaths and several architects who have rescued them, making it practically impossible to find a clean slate anywhere today.
The city as a complex ecosystem of buildings, uses and flows, has always allowed cohabitation between various stages of the life cycle: Voids, Construction, Buildings, Ruins.
The expectant emptiness, the ongoing constructions, the inhabited buildings, the disused spaces. Everything is city: the apparent perenniality of built matter is a false perception; everything moves in time, it is either becoming or decaying; just as in biology, there is no neutrality. A cyclical renewal of uses, spaces inhabited continuously for over 500 years, a long chain of generations, with alterations, repairs, transformations and extensions, palimpsests of time and matter.
Neighbourhood by neighbourhood, street by street, in every single wall, highly dependent on the distribution and concentration of the parts of the whole, making the city the physical expression of our collective identity.
