Bruno Marques

This chapter proposes that the philosophy of phenomenology is highly applicable, if not necessary, for a deeper and more integrated approach to spatial design disciplines in a world that aspire to be sustainable. The chapter develops upon the frameworks established by Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, and the works since which have attempted integration of such ideas in architecture and design, such as those by Aalto, Norberg-Schulz, Pallasmaa, Frampton, and Zumthor. It evaluates key historical and more recent phenomenological concepts for their importance in contemporary spatial design. Reflecting on these diverse views this chapter focuses on two strands and evaluates their usefulness in facilitating the uptake of sustainability in architecture and design. Although the two notions explored are different, jointly they show that there are significant constructive implications for phenomenology within architecture and design.The chapter discusses the phenomenological concepts, their inherent relevance for spatial design disciplines and supports that discussion through a series of contemporary student projects in landscape architecture, furniture design, and architectural construction. Especially significant is a conceptual interpretation of pro-sustainable efforts as inherently and deeply reflective of many values already captured in phenomenology, and that through the active use of phenomenological concepts a more pro-sustainable design becomes possible.

The fictional regime of the photographic image allows Helena Almeida to stage a theatrical metamorphosis of her own body through displacements, expansions and dissimulations, placing photography at the heart of a pictorial transgression that undermines the disciplinary boundaries of visual media: the artist becomes ink, inhabits the empty canvas space, multiplies herself in mirror games that produce the unfolding of a body in deep crisis, thrown beyond its physical limits and identity. Moreover, in multimedia works such as Feel me, Hear me and See me (1979–1980), as well as in some images of the series entitled The House (1982–1983), Almeida seems to move towards a radical linguistic and pictorial derangement, likely to break the traditional communicative and representative mechanisms. We seek to demonstrate, on the basis of these different aspects relating to photography’s effects of hybridization, and making use of the post-structuralist thought of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, that the artist moves towards the designation of a structural space that combines photography, writing and the reinvention of the body. Almeida’s work confronts us with a complex reconfiguration of ways of seeing, feeling and thinking the photographic act, as well as its discursive features.

This article focuses on seven well-known feature films of the so-called “golden period” of Portuguese cinema – A Canção de Lisboa (1933),O Pai Tirano (1941), O Pátio das Cantigas (1942), O Costa do Castelo (1943), A Menina da Rádio (1944), A Vizinha do Lado (1945), and O Leão da Estrela (1947) – in order to address the way female and male roles were presented while in the process of courtship leading to marriage, during the first two decades of Estado Novo (New 20. State) (1930-1950) – a very conservative dictatorial regime with close relations to the Catholic Church. For that, we will look into some correlated topics: the way rituals of display of affection were dramatized on the big screen, the “seduction” strategies, the dating protocols, the role of modesty and of family surveillance, the way marriage was idealized and how it was envisaged as a life project, the dealing with passional dilemmas, the forbidden loves, the extramarital relationships and the love triangles.