As stated in the Call for Papers of this second panel of the conference, the session sought to fully tackle the core of the relationship between architecture and photography in its irrefutable urban context. The general approach to confront these thoughts would surely have to do with the perceptive and the phenomenological, that is, with the individual and social implications of the visual experience of architecture in the urban context. Likewise, the link between architecture and the city through its visual taxonomy could be detached from the ground —and therefore of experimental and sensory condition— and moved to an interactive virtual map. The image of the architecture in the city can also be read and used methodologically from the abstraction that confers its digital mapping.
The first of the selected papers, “Clareira: Towards a phenomenological perspective in the representation of architectural space”, represents an exceptional and paradigmatic case study of this new sensibility that gives the photographer an authentic mediating role between the urban space and the use made of it by its users. The interest of this particular work is the value attached to photography as a research tool. An investigation that is and should be open and communicative. Photography is thus enriched with its pedagogical dimension, with an invitation to refine the perceptual gaze. The user lives and uses a space —the Trindade subway station in Porto, by Eduardo Souto de Moura— but is sometimes unable to internalize and visualize his or her phenomenological experience, even atmospheric, we could say. e opportunity to move from the objective values to the subjective readings of the urban and architectural space through photography is surely one of the most enriching contributions of this rigorous project to the general debate of the congress.
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