The Stones of Penha

Fábio Gsell

Once there were just stones.

The work is about imagining the past. The city was built - many streets, squares, houses, palaces were built, everything made of stone. Stone as a material - solid and extremely sustainable in terms of durability. For the construction of the city, we humans always destroyed the stones as found in their natural form in a certain way and decontextualized them. That‘s architecture. Because architecture is nothing more than the joining of a material to a shape with which we humans can assert ourselves in nature. This goes so far that we can hardly speak of nature nowadays. Here in Guimarães we can hardly find a granite stone in its natural form in the city centre.

My idea is to investigate how a naturally already found granite stone would influence and change todays already built public spaces in Guimarães. The idea is to bring the still existing identity of the Penha in form of a stone from the past into the city. It is as if we kept the natural stone and built afterwards together with this natural stone the public space. The question of the qualities of each public space arise. Therefore it is important to understand this work as an imagination.