Collision of fragments in the city space
Raquel Lagoa (1996) is a portuguese architect and researcher currently based in Barcelona, working in Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura (RBTA).
With a background between Oporto, Paris and Barcelona, she has experienced a multidisciplinary path between architecture, urbanism, photography and visual arts, having the city as the main character.
The act of writing has revealed itself to be an instrument of project that reflects a critical discourse in a logical link between architecture, city, art and image, having been the author of several articles published in: Fundación Arquia Blog (Barcelona), MA Magazine (FAUP, Oporto), NU Magazine (DARQ, Coimbra) and Scopio Editions (OPorto) and ESAD (Oporto).
As an individual researcher, she started an investigation that allies reasoning through writing with communication through image, contributing to the construction of a critical discourse that aims to decode the enigma of the real, where architecture and city converge through their fragments.
In 2022 she won a special mention in Archiprix architecture award, in the category of 'thought and criticism', with the project " Fragments of city, images of architecture, space and memory ".
This project announces an investigation that, anchored to abstraction and a set of disruptive thoughts, aims to decode the enigma of the real, where architecture and city converge. A momentary abandonment of the physical world promotes tangency with art and image, respective authors and works that preserve the best of both material and immaterial worlds.
Scattered fragments and images will dominate the layer of unconsciousness as traces and nuances of architecture and city that never allow us to abandon them, physically and spiritually. Conceived as an archive of the present, this project creates an unprecedented space between the real and fiction, where utopia emerges as a method of thinking about the city, anticipating a future practice in architecture.
Identical to Walter Benjamin’s ambition, this project aspires to be a ‘work made of fragments’ that spread from form to content, from structure to method. Fragments that reflect the process of deconstruction of the real and the urgency of building a new image of the city.
The intention of creating a movement against the static and immovable real is realized in the wandering between chapters, through images and works that enrich the critical and innovative study of architecture and its current circumstance.
The narrative, which begins from utopia to reach the real, centralizes the action in the rescue of fragments of the banality of everyday life, which move from memory to the conscious, becoming visible and useful as instruments of architectural thought, images that project themselves and project us beyond the real space of the city.
As a design strategy, collage allows you to move, create or erase elements of history, redraw present scenarios or imagine those of the future. Possible or impossible in the universe of the real, these fictional images are an engine of inspiration and a weapon of criticism, an alternative to speech that, limited to words, is often ignored or forgotten in the context of cities.