THAT WHICH IS WITHIN AND OUTSIDE
BY DANILO TOLENTINO LEITE FERREIRA
“It is a bridge [...] that is nothing more than a connection between the rural and the urban. [...] It marks the entry into the city and the appointment of a time in the passage from one place to another. ”
The above excerpt is part of the descriptive memorial for the Metro Station project: Parque Maia (2001-2007), authored by the architect João Álvaro Rocha. It is an object purposely inserted in that place as a structure that marks. The “building bridge”, in the words of the architect, inhabited infrastructure, consists of a metallic body and sealed in glass, as a kind of cocoon in visual contact with the live grove, the national one that passes below and the horizon, subtly announced, of the city. Glass, an extremely important element for this project, attenuates the strength of the structure, protects from the intense noise caused by the flow of automobiles. Above all, it allows its surroundings to invade the interior of the station, confusing "What is inside and what is outside". By revisiting Guido Guidi's countless studies on the changing landscape and the relationship established between internal and external environments; the precision of Gabriele Basilico when registering poetically architectures that move between macro and micro scale, the present work proposes to try such an exercise. In a visual narrative, he investigates the materiality of this “inhabited bridge” and how the limits of an architecture designed to be inhabited and transform a landscape are established. The bridge between two banks of a cinced site.