Celebrating the water in the city.

Abstract

This Master Thesis began in Berlin, in March 2013, with a full month of meetings, presentations and discussions. This reflexion period was the first step of a long thinking process, following a two-year debate among us, colleagues of A.S.G Class 2, during our 8 cities’ Master Program. This fulfilling journey made me thirsty for my home city, giving me the will to answer to Lisbon’s present reality by addressing the problems considered and discussed throughout this program. The basic task given to us, Lisbon’s cluster, was to develop a public swimming pool in the city’s historic centre seconded by a theoretical study for a broader potential urban and architectural transformation. As there is a millennial connection between water and human settlement and as water is the primary element that shaped and ordered Lisbon, my investigation focused on water and its celebration. The river Tagus mouth was also Portugal’s gateway to new lands, the launching ramp of an enterprise that expanded the old continent’s worldview, but the presence of water in the city and Lisbon’s relation to it changed throughout the centuries: it is still physically there but its visibility and experience suffered severe transformations. Dealing with the hard reality and the populations still dwindling at the heart of Lisbon among the new tourism that now occupies the city, this work tries to consider Lisbon’s vanished water, using it as a key to a specific architectural interaction that dialogues the urban basic commandments, the sense of a public life. A balanced system that generates life in the city, for everyone.