Luís Santiago Baptista (WG4) and Maria Rita Pais are the winners of the Thought and Criticism 2020 FAD prize. With contributions of Susana Oliveira (WG1) and Eliana Sousa Santos (WG2) we are proud to share this delighted news. For more information check the following site: http://arquinfad.org/premisfad/es/ediciones-anteriores/?edicio/2020/obra/10749/
Jury Statement:
“Every day we travel to the unknown. The book Viagem ao Invisível is an elaboration of Thought & Criticism of architecture that offers us original tools to rediscover the space and the architectural culture in which we live. The jury of this edition of the FAD Prize had to debate on the proposals received at a time of great uncertainty and difficulty, in which the consolidated foundations of our way of life in the XXI century have been shaken and a clear future is not in sight for society. The election of Viagem ao Invisível, among a wide range of works so stimulating and with enormous critical and intellectual potential, reflects this uncertainty. Viagem ao Invisível evokes the format of the books of explorers of an unknown world. In it, a group of authors articulates points of view crossed from within and outside the discipline to reconstruct a subjective landscape and territory, in search of the new from the spontaneity of who travels. It embodies an ideological position, for the right that we have to read the world away from the preconceived. This ambition for novelty, for the unexpected, is materialized in an original network, in which historical research intersects with the exploration of art, associating the rigor of the project with the subjectivity of the image, contrasting the anthropological reading with the geographical description. A method that explores how to transmit the results of an intimate and personal search to the general public, through an exhibition project that divides the limits between the real and the imagined, from the complexity of time as memory and future. It is a work that shows that knowledge can be discovered and built from the unknown: a precious methodological contribution to imagining ways of dealing with the uncertainties of the present. Today, with this award that for the first time will be announced and celebrated by teleconference, with physical distance and anxiety about what the future holds, architecture must continue to rethink its foundations, its limits and its transformative capacity. And we hope that this Thought and Criticism Award to Viagem ao Invisível contributes to expanding the sense of the collective construction of knowledge, as well as its potential, that emanate from contemporary architecture. In moments of uncertainty like the current one, architecture is also capable of projecting the bases of thought from the invisible.”
