Habitable sculpture by Miguel Arruda

The slow dialogue between manual design and digital design in Miguel Arruda's habitable sculpture.

The search for a new generation of architects has become a recurrent theme in Portugal, with a flurry of exhibitions and publications eager to spotlight anything innovative on the country's architectural scene. One of the main trends has been an increased reliance on information technology and its rapid entry into the profession. Indeed, more and more architects are pinning their hopes on digital technologies to develop formal experiments that are then transformed into architectural designs. Oddly enough, in reality this greater technological capacity has not been accompanied by stricter design standards or choices. Some architects almost seem to decline personal responsibility, by trying to attribute selfdetermination to digital tools through the false artificial intelligence of scripts and plug-ins. An uncontrolled rash of blobs, organic forms and parametric drawings has ensued, which purport to be archetypes of contemporary architecture. But there are also a few nice surprises, with genuinely innovative ideas from people capable of introducing new tools and adapting them to the architectural process. Miguel Arruda's Habitable Sculpture is one such case. Like a sculptor turned architect, his work very often resembles a mixture of sculpture and architecture, with unexpected results achieved by combinations of form and pragmatic necessities. Far from being the merely constructive formalisation of a wholly digital object, this project has a history that winds through Arruda's 40-year-long career. His first exhibit was a sculpture, about 15 centimetres high, in chromed iron with anthropomorphic forms. It was shown in 1968 at the Galeria Diário de Notícias in Lisbon. With the pretext of formalising an experiment in a scaled enlargement to define an interior, an architectural object was created by digitalising the original sculpture. Enlarged about 50 times, the new piece reaches a human scale in a proportion extended to 10 metres. This, says Arruda, "allowed me to escalate from a piece that could be manipulated to a piece that can be penetrated", thus transforming a sculpture into architecture. The project displayed is simply the prototype for a real-scale container of tactile and sensorial perception that tries to dialogue with its surroundings through the choice of cork as its material. The qualities of a dwelling can be glimpsed through the dialogue between the work's exterior and the spatiality of its interior scale. For this reason we eagerly await the next stage of this object, when its merits can be fully tested. Carlos Sant'Ana

Author: Miguel Arruda
Team: Pedro Léger Pereira
Structure: Afaconsult
Construction: DUSTRIMETAL
Finishing: Grupo Amorin
Mounting: Construções Casimiro
Totem: Termoono
Audiovisual: Restart
Lighting: Donker by LGT
Date: July-October 2010
Local: Olives Garden, CCB, Lisbon, Portugal
Photos: FG+SG – Fotografia de Arquitectura