Joao Silva Leite | Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade de Lisboa (original) (raw)

Papers by Joao Silva Leite

Emergent Streets, 2016

The city, today, presents itself as an urban organism of great complexity and diversity. Its stru... more The city, today, presents itself as an urban organism of great complexity and diversity. Its structure is increasingly composed by a growing number of elements, systems, dynamics and layers, making the exercise of its reading and understanding, equally complex tasks. Its strong growth during the twentieth century and the emergence of the car generated new shapes of urban fabric, which are not totally recognisable within the stabilised concepts. The city urban fabric develops in a fragmented way and tries to aggregate itself around the main mobility axes. Emerge new linear urban elements, with a strong infrastructural character that become links between several fragments, deforming the perception of space and travel’s time.
The Street, as the most common urban element in the public component of the occidental city, incorporates in its form solutions that reflect the new urban paradigms. Its channel space, acquires new configurations, it multiples in different layers, built hybrid and ambiguous relations and develops tensions between public space and built fabric. The classic elements of the urban fabric production gain new forms and interpretations, still to be consolidated and decoded.
Thus, the thesis makes a type-morphological study about the Street, specifically about it actual formal trends and having the Portuguese territory as space of analysis. Focus mainly in a set of urban linear elements, which structuring parts of the territory present, simultaneously, characteristics recognizable with the traditional street. Through synchronic and diachronic readings and through the decomposition of the element intended to reflect about it morphological characteristics, dynamics and transformation processes. It attempts, in this way, to systematize a phenomenon and a thought about urban production, in order to contribute to a better understanding of the contemporary city and consequently intervene in a more balanced and consciously way.

Learning from Rome. Historical cities and contemporary design., 2018

The urban form results from the permanent confrontation between the need for change and, at the s... more The urban form results from the permanent confrontation between the need for change and, at the same time, preserving the existing urban and architectural tradition and matrix, in order to maintain the existing city, coherent to the people that use it.
Now, more than ever, the manifestations of change in the city shape point towards the preservation of our urban resources, which are vast and very rich, but need to, above all, be suited to the city current and future needs. So, the historical or consolidated urban fabric should be interpreted as a didactic tool in the production of new spaces.
In Lisbon, particularly if our focus is on the dialectical built between the block and the street, we realize that, in fact, the urban fabric heterogeneous nature is the result of the accumulation of different urban processes, crystalized in their formal characteristics. This fact reveals a great capacity for reinvention.
Thus and having as reference a set of contemporary interventions in blocks of Lisbon, associated with different urban axes of the city, this work tries, through a morphological reading to realize the importance that these elements - block and street - can play in restructuring the urban fabric or even as conceptual support for the city of sedimentation process.

Shaping The Quality of Life, 2018

The urban mobility infrastructure axes have an important potential in the structuring and aggrega... more The urban mobility infrastructure axes have an important potential in the structuring and aggregation of the urban fabric. Throughout the last century this fact takes on special relevance due to the increasing fragmentation of the fabric and its processes of composition. It is through the main infrastructural axes that the relations of continuity, physical and spatial, are often preserved occurring in certain cases a distortion of the notions of space and time.

Thus, the strategic (and spatial) value of these urban elements causes, in the contemporary city, the definition of new linear centralities that attract buildings and singular uses. Marginal occupation often occurs in a fragmented and individual way. Infrastructure and urban fabric are thought out, and constructed, separately, creating often weak morphological relationships or indirect systems. Despite this, it is evident the creation of symbiotic mechanisms of interrelation between the infrastructural axis and the surrounding built fabric. Its formal caracteristics are influenciated by the visibility allowed by the infrasctrutural axis. A more or less constant continuum is built, but the vision as a whole appears relatively inconsistent, not stabilized and poorly articulated with the adjacent urban context.

The formal composition of the building itself has contradictory characteristics, on one hand it establishes strong visual and functional bonds with the infrastructural axis, but on other hand, its form as an architectural object, does not always contribute to a qualification of the space as a whole.

The article seeks to look in a particular way for the case of the Start-Up Buildings, singular buildings that by their morphological and functional characteristics are promoters of particular dynamics capable of reinventing the urban space around them. There is particular interest in its ability to generate ambiguous urban spaces, developers of crossings and connections between distinct parts of the city, as well as links between the built fabric and the mobility infrastructure that supports it.

In this way, through the study of these Start-Up Buildings is intended to collect contributions that can inform the exercise of the project, using them as didactic objects and not as models. It seeks to systematize principles of composition that allow a better articulation between certain infrastructural axes and the singular buildings that surround them, such as for example shopping centres or megastores. The qualification of the public space and the relation that it constructs with the collective space is seen as a factor that would potentiate the capacity to connect the two elements: infrastructure and building.

The contemporary city presents itself as an urban organism of great complexity, consisting of an ... more The contemporary city presents itself as an urban organism of great complexity, consisting of an increasingly number of elements, systems, dynamics and extracts, which makes their reading an equally complex task. The method of typo-morphological analysis, it is assumed in this context, as an important reading tool of the city, giving order to what is naturally disordered through a classification process of the different elements that structure it – streets, squares, urban blocks, buildings, plots, among others. It is precisely from the reading of two structural elements of the city urban fabric, the urban block and the street, that we seek to illustrate the applicability of the methodology and its usefulness in the academic education and as a tool in the (re) design process of the city.

Ambivalent Landscapes. Sorting out the presente by designing the future, Dec 2012

The contemporary urban territory incorporates a complex and vast number of different development ... more The contemporary urban territory incorporates a complex and vast number of different development modes. Urban growth according to the logic of contiguity of urban fabric is broken, especially with the democratization of access to the media, the car initially (2nd quarter of the twentieth century) and more recently the internet. The urban fabric is consolidated in areas near the mobility infrastructures, establishing through them the continuity relationships. The infrastructural network assumes a particular relevance in the structure and organization of urban space today.

Da Baixa Pombalina a Brasília, Iluminismo e Contemporaneidade em Países e Espaços de Língua Portuguesa – Estruturas Urbanas., 2010

A "rua" sendo elemento urbano mais comum e banal na construção dos tecidos urbanos da cidade ocid... more A "rua" sendo elemento urbano mais comum e banal na construção dos tecidos urbanos da cidade ocidental, assume desde sempre na organização tradicional da cidade portuguesa, um papel estruturante na construção de cidade e que facilmente pode ser observado através do estudo da "Rua Direita". Tal facto sucede igualmente na actualidade através da "Estrada Comercial" que de um modo informal estrutura grandes áreas urbanas periféricas da Área Metropolitana de Lisboa.

RiURB, Sep 2013

A Rua, dentro da matriz cultural ocidental, é o elemento urbano mais comum na produção de tecidos... more A Rua, dentro da matriz cultural ocidental, é o elemento urbano mais comum na produção de tecidos urbanos, estruturando e constituindo espaço público, local privilegiado para a sociabilização de indivíduos, mas também fundamental na organização e desenvolvimento da própria cidade. Todavia, na realidade portuguesa, as estradas adquirem hoje novas funções e configurações que frequentemente detectámos na rua tradicional, sobrepondo-as à sua função primordial. Este facto surge como consequência do acentuado crescimento urbano registado nas últimas décadas, que por sua vez levou à inclusão de troços significativos de antigas estradas nacionais nos tecidos metropolitanos. A rede de mobilidade torna-se uma estrutura relevante na ligação entre vários tecidos urbanos dispersos e desarticulados. Emergem elementos urbanos com morfologias que, nem sempre, são reconhecíveis à luz dos conceitos estabilizados. O artigo apresenta um estudo morfológico da estrada N378, localizada na metrópole de Lisboa. Esta estrada, que pode ser caracterizada como Estrada Comercial, espelha um processo de transformação de antiga estrada nacional que actualmente desempenha um papel importante na estruturação de um território urbano. A análise sobre o objecto incide sobre a sua morfogénese, morfologia e tipificação, procurando dissecá-lo e deste modo compreender melhor o fenómeno. Por outro lado, o estudo pretende contribuir para o debate sobre quais as características e potencialidades a serem exploradas nestes elementos filamentares para maior coesão e legibilidade urbana.

Books by Joao Silva Leite

A consolidação do automóvel como veículo preferencial de deslocação de pessoas e bens, aliado a p... more A consolidação do automóvel como veículo preferencial de deslocação de pessoas e bens, aliado a processos de crescimento urbano fragmentado provocou intensas transformações na cidade do século XX e no seu tecido. Como organismo a sua complexidade aumentou, o corpo compõe-se por um número crescente de elementos, sistemas, dinâmicas e estratos, que dificultam a sua leitura e decifragem. Os eixos infraestruturais de grande mobilidade assumem um papel importante na manutenção de algumas ligações morfológicas, afirmando-se como elementos estruturadores do território. O seu espaço canal é colonizado por uma urbanização constante que adquire características específicas, definidoras de uma identidade própria. Emergem, assim, elementos urbanos lineares capazes de suportar tecido urbano e, simultaneamente, permitir deslocações entre partes distintas do território. Neste sentido, o estudo do processo de transformação destes elementos lineares sedimenta, por um lado, o seu entendimento como tendências emergentes da Rua e, por outro, contribui para a sistematização de um fenómeno melhorando e criando novos mecanismos de produção urbana mais equilibrados e conscientes dos paradigmas urbanos contemporâneos.