Born in a privileged location, the ‘new’ Porto Business School, chosen to be photographically portrayed in the development of this visual narrative, a gesture flourishes, strongly integrated into the urban fabric, close to various types of access and means of transport, from Francisco Sá Carneiro International Airport to Sete Bicas Metro Station, revealing itself as an important articulation point for the city of Porto.
The building is the result of a project by a multidisciplinary architecture and engineering team, led by architect José Manuel Soares, with great ambitions to comply with the most demanding European sustainability and energy efficiency standards. The seven-storey building includes a plural and diversified programme that includes classroom spaces, offices for student and teacher research, libraries, a restaurant, auditoriums for small and large events and underground parking, as well as a vast garden whose vegetation is exclusively made up of adapted Portuguese and native species and whose design accentuates the relationship with the surroundings.
The photographic work of Helen Binet is a source of inspiration for this work, due to the capacity that photography has of providing different sensations, through a play between light and shadow, achieved by specific visual strategies used and explored by us in different ways. From the use of limited tonalities, with the main emphasis on the monochrome gaze, to the use of repetition through a game of layers found in the same frame, giving rhythm to the image, everything seeks to converge to reveal photographs with an abstract component, which induce a self-developed interpretation on the viewer: “As you know, when you are in a space all your senses are involved in perception. All your senses are working: you can smell, you can be cold, you can move, you can hear, you can remember, you can imagine the plan of the building. It is very complex (…)”[1].
Another author who played an important role in the contamination of our working process was the photographer Michael Wesely, mainly because he worked on a kind of “Visual Archaeology”, which allows different layers of time to be superimposed on the same photograph, promoting the transformation of a static image into a moving image, either by dematerialising what is being photographed or by the continuous and simultaneous creation and destruction of what is being observed.
“It will be a bit like an architectural walk. One enters: the architectural spectacle is immediately offered to the eye; one follows an itinerary, and the perspectives unfold with great variety”[2].
With these intentions in mind, the work contemplates the idea of an architectural promenade, combining it with the sensations provoked when visiting the various spaces of the building for the first time. The first photographs announce themselves as a route of arrival at the building under study, which reveals itself in a constant relationship with the surrounding metro station. Accompanying this relationship is the punctuation of the blue of the façade and the rhythms and reflections that the work promotes, instigating the achievement of a great strategic continuity between exploring the exterior and travelling through the various interior spaces.
In the interior, the route is followed by the predominance of a monochromatic gaze, which seeks to promote and articulate different strategies in the same gesture, from the uninterrupted contrast between light and shadow, to the simplicity of the rhythm discovered in a game of layers, to the abstraction achieved by highlighting the discrete notes of colour present in the various spaces. The viewer’s perception is led by the harmonisation of the elements that make up the space, which give them different ways of being in and moving through each environment, leading to different interpretations through an understanding of the possible uses of the space.
[1] Ventura, Susana; Binet, Hélène. “The pure sensation of photography: Interview with Hélène Binet”, Scopio, 2010
[2] (Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complète de 1910-1929, 60)
