Sea Architectures

 

The Portuguese littoral, as a humanized territory, mirrors the millenary maritime vocation of Portugal. This vocation has manifested itself in diverse ways since always, and immediately through the cultural appropriation of the coast by the architecture of the structures that support the exploit of the sea. In fact, the land-sea interface is a valuable area, but also an ecologically sensible one, that guarantees the territorial integrity and its heritage in its most diverse manifestations.

 

The identity of this landscape unit, presenting specificities that are inherent to the different coastal typologies, is a value that is important to preserve, not to maintain a few isolated characteristics under protection, but through determining a coherent set of criteria that may inspire models of intervention that are able to incorporate development policies without risking that landscape identity.

 

Current concepts of intervention restrict themselves to a partial — and usually preventive — perspective of ecological sustainability, namely the National Ecological Reserve and the Maritime Public Domain, or the rehabilitation of the urban space and the buildings in accordance with The Charter of Krakow. Despite the purposes of the Land Spatial Plannings (Planos de Ordenamento do Território or PROT’s) to determine territorial models, to set up prescriptive guidance in the elaboration of management instruments, action and investment programs in the different domains at the local level, even in the areas underState jurisdiction it is uncommon to observe interventions that we may consider as integrated. The Spatial Planning of the Coastline (Planos de Ordenamento da Orla Costeira) seek to discipline onlythe nautical traffic and coastal use of beaches, docks, marines and anchoring places. In the sphere of built heritage, only a list of classified buildings settled in the coast (like towers and fortresses) is already done.

 

We have thus highlighted the great contours of territorial characterization above, its potentialities and weaknesses. It should be added that in the areas under the jurisdiction of the Port and Sea Transport Institute (Instituto Portuário e dos Transportes Marítimos), where the buildings characterizes the first intervention of the Portuguese State in the maritime management, in the middle of the eighteenth-century, that was made in order to respond to increasing needs imposed by a growing international settled trade.

 

These buildings were excluded from these plans. Therefore, the survey and the study of the maritimebuildings settled in environmentally sensible areas, like the Natura 2000 Network Sites, are still to be done. Our research team aims at bridging the historical and architectonic knowledge of these spaces with the presentation of proposals of integrated intervention concerning the uses, landscape framing and architectonic rehabilitation, with regard to regional specificities and its fitting into the local culture, and considering that thehuman activities must be compatible with the preservation of these values, as a way to guarantee a sustainable management from the ecological, economical and social points of view. This highly qualified research team has a large experience of work in Protected Areas, architectonic surveys, structures, the study of building materials and techniques, characterizationof natural/ecological areas, ethnographic research, bibliographical research and analysis, and systems of collective occupation.

 

In order to determine the research strategy, the sea is assumed to have always been the main pathway where men, commodities and ideas circulated, determining in different degree the human activities developed there and producing very significant cultural differences at the regional level. Thus, the research team has selected the maritime coast of Arrábida and the coast of the Eastern Algarve, both included in the National Network of Protected Areas, as areas of study. After a prior survey in these territories, we will select the case studies, which can be buildings settled in natural spaces, or sets of buildings and the space around them.

 

These case studies will be analized then in detail with the intent of determining as rigorously as possible its relevance as heritage, the predictable "impact" of the changes in their uses and meanings, and to suggest integrated interventions as illustrations. The concept of intervention proposed will thus be based in a reinterpretation of tradition, following the current concepts of ecological and cultural sustainability found in the European Landscape Convention and, concerning the built, in the revision of the concepts of building, repairing and restoring the built heritage. This joint work of research centers in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, archeology,anthropology and environmental sciences aims at formulating a set of criteria thatmay sustain transdisciplinar operative models of intervention.