Near Mouzinho de Albuquerque Square (Rotunda da Boavista), Casa da Música and its Subway Station, an ample urban space, is placed with dramatically different characteristics of the neighbouring structures. This entire zone, mainly since the 80’s, was conceived and drawn to centre in itself great symbolic and referential load becoming an important landmark in a collective identity of the city. In the centre of this zone, Boavista, a great portion of urban space is presented intriguing for the great contrast of characteristics.
Far from planed forms towards mediatisation, the lot presents remaining ruins of an old train station abandoned several decades ago. Now, it seems to be in a speculative process, a slow one, of renewal that can reintegrate it in the conventional urban system.
Today, without any private or public action (not for much longer, we suppose… having in mind the huge price of it), it also seems under another marginalizing process - the inattention and carelessness of those who walk through the city. Sometimes walled in others frankly opened, it seems to have developed in its limits an abyss, an imposed category of a “non-city” and others many concepts using the prefix “non-”, assenting and helping its omission.
Beyond the dismantled forms, surfaces reveal
expressions of poverty and revolt and also shelter a reality kept out of
society. The still existing buildings receive a group of individuals, mainly
migrants, also suffering from an imposed category that alienates and miss them
out. There they manage a quotidian shelter fed by forgetfulness, just side by
side with the dazzling city.
