A Paisagem Arquitetónica da Cultura da Vinha da Ilha do Pico – códigos para a conceção de uma identidade a partir de muros de pedra

Objectives

The research aims to reflect on the contribution of the architectural narrative to contemporary intervention practices in classified landscapes, namely the possibility of operating, reconfiguring and mediating them without coming into conflict. Taking the Pico Island Vineyard Landscape as its object and as case studies 10 rural settlements that constitute ‘the most significant examples of traditional architecture, landscape construction, ways of life, uses and traditions of its inhabitants’, the aim is to study the forms in their qualitative and not just quantitative component, purifying them to their essence, structure, logics and connotations, as well as the qualities that give them consistency and coherence. They will be analysed at 3 levels:

1. the circumstances of the territory and landscape (scale 1.25000);
2. the organisational matrix of rural settlements (scale 1.2000) and
3. the fundamentals of the grammar of architectural forms (scale 1.100).

On the assumption that this research is primarily a contribution to architecture practice, the aim is to build a methodological tool with a double general objective: to know in order to operate (to detect the elementary forms in order to fix the matrix permanences and transform the variables) and to know in order to participate (to question the regulatory framework resulting from the UNESCO classification and propose a sustained and well-founded revision). This project tool has the following specific objectives:

1. to promote knowledge in the disciplinary field of architecture about the reading of a dialogical landscape – Pico/Faial, countryside/city, vine cultivation/wine marketing, sea/mountain; architecture/agriculture – that captures the combination of contexts, processes and authors;
2. to understand the circumstances in which rural settlements were established, not just limited to the study of wine-growing nuclei, but expanded to a complex system of external relationships (transversal, between the mountain, the sea and the island of Faial, and longitudinal, between settlements) and what each of them brings to their spatial organisation;
3. detect the matrix pattern and the variables in the organisation models of rural settlements, as well as the type-morphological principles of buildings, including the possible contamination of similar buildings on the neighbouring island;
4. identify formal invariants in order to fix them and detect mutations in order to reconfigure them, contributing to the balance between permanence and transformation of the landscape; and
5. build a framework that sustains inherited forms and enables their revitalisation for different uses, without jeopardising legibility, identity and, above all, the meaning of architecture.