deconarch

Are you looking for a spontaneous getaway and have no idea where to go? Why not to Portugal –

in November, there is a photography show at Guimarães presenting new works by Inês d’Orey, a young Portuguese photographer I introduced you a while ago.

Volver
Escola de Arquitectura

Universidade do Minho

Guimarães

31.10.2008 – 30.11.2008

More information here

The exhibition VOLVER presents works that portray the architecture school’s new building by Fernando Távora and Jose Bernardo Távora:

(about the architecture school)

DAA (Departamento de Arquitectura) used to operate in temporary facilities at the University campus in Azurém, Guimarães. In September 2004, it moved to the School of Architecture building, designed by the architects F. Távora and J.B. Távora, facing the new buildings of the School of Sciences and School of Engineering. Manuel Fernandes described the edifice as a “long straight corridor, forming a long and elegant body … it systematically distributes all the successive internal spaces that cross it. These are, namely: the lounge spaces, access to the external yard, lecture theatres, library, administrative area and, finally, access to another long wing of the building. Together with the first corridor-body, it forms an L shape and is the location for the offices, laboratories and classrooms. [...] The unique view to the secular and symbolic castle is the constant ‘Leitmotiv’ in these classrooms…”

(original quote here)

(The following info are citations from the exhibition profile – as I don’t know Portuguese, it’s just a rough translation of the most important thoughts that I could make out).

Shot between July and August 2008 – i.e. during summer holidays -, d’Orey’s photographs document the empty, silent rooms. The atmospheric pictures poses questions like: What does a library without books make a library? Is a garage without cars still a garage? Can we still call it “library” or “garage”?

There’s nothing in these photographs that allows us to call the portrayed building a School of Architecture.

The way d’Orey reduces architecture to form reminds of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Yet unlike the Bechers, her pictures don’t legitimate themselves from a pretended objectivity and neutrality, but she uses the means of her medium to dramatize space.