CDUA_ entreaberto. Fundo Rui Pimentel: a escala humana
Exhibition
CDUA_ entreaberto. Fundo Rui Pimentel: a escala humana Exhibition
December 14, 2023 - February 29, 2024, Mondays - Fridays (except public holidays), 8 a.m.-8 p.m., Documentation Center Atrium
The exhibition 'Centro de Documentação de Urbanismo e Arquitetura_ entreaberto' focuses on the Rui Pimentel Fund, made up of documents relating to his school activity, his professional practice and his personal library, kindly donated by his family. The collection of these documents opens up a number of different ways of looking at the architect's work, which was part of the unique process of implementing and disseminating modern architecture in Porto, with reference to the ideas developed by CIAM and its consequent revision, especially on the basis of Italian architectural culture.
Rui Pimentel (1924-2005) is part of the third generation of modern Portuguese architects, born between 1917 and 1927 and trained at EBAP/ESBAP from the 1940s onwards, who asserted themselves with a practice that was aware of the national circumstances, namely through ODAM, and based on the social role of the architect who was aware of the modern ideals still to be fulfilled on the Portuguese scene.
The title of the exhibition evokes one of the main problems driving his multifaceted work - the human scale - based on the text with the same title that Rui Pimentel, under the pseudonym ArCo, published in the newspaper "A Tarde", Suplemento Arte, no. 1, of June 9, 1945. Here he calls for "Human scale. This is our unity. The geometric place of all studies, research and creations; the fulcrum of all human activity. It must be the utmost concern of the active human being... his conditioning; the foundation of every observer, of every creator."Under this demand, the exhibition includes a selected set of project drawings, both of an academic nature - the CODA (1964) and works from the Higher Course "Projecto de Grande Composição (1951/52)", taught by Carlos Ramos and Mário Bonito - and of works built or to be built. In addition, there is a collection of unique magazines from Rui Pimentel's personal library, about authors who frame his work.
The exhibition, in the CDUA atrium, opens on December 14, to commemorate Rui Pimentel's birthday, and will continue throughout 2014, when he will be 100 years old. At the same time, the exhibition will be the venue for a series of actions to discuss the architect's work in the present, to be announced in due course.
'CDUA_ entreaberto' aims to open up the FAUP Documentation Center to the academic community, making known one of its documentary collections of special value for clarifying the path of modern Portuguese architecture as a foundational moment of our architectural contemporaneity.
The exhibition 'CDUA_ entreaberto. Fundo Rui Pimentel: a escala humana' is part of the research line Atlas da Casa - 'Identity and Transfer', in the project 'Dialogues and Affinities: project practices: drawing and writing'.