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DESIGN ACTIVISM IN THE CONTEXT OF MACAU : ADDING LAYERS TO ARCHITECTURAL INTENT澳門背景下設計的能動性：為建築意圖加添層次

This article examines the building of the Escola Comercial Pedro Nolasco (EPM), commonly referred to as the Portuguese School of Macau, designed by Raúl Chorão Ramalho following the dissolution of the GCU and within a context of shifting urban design toward private practice. Based on this case, the...

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Published in:Review of Culture
Main Author: Rui Leão
Format: Articles
Published: Instituto Cultural de Macau 2015
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Articles
Online Access:https://www.icm.gov.mo/rc/viewer/pdfViewerParts/40050/3919
Summary:This article examines the building of the Escola Comercial Pedro Nolasco (EPM), commonly referred to as the Portuguese School of Macau, designed by Raúl Chorão Ramalho following the dissolution of the GCU and within a context of shifting urban design toward private practice. Based on this case, the author proposes understanding the school not merely as a landmark modernist work, but as a form of “design activism” capable of adding layers to architectural intention, articulating aesthetic, pedagogical, and urban formulations with the contemporary management of heritage. Methodologically, the text mobilises architectural analysis and historical-institutional readings, relating the building to debates within European modernism and to cultural reassessments of the “Orient” in twentieth-century architectural culture. The conclusions highlight the gradual construction of a “layered” urban presence, visible in the transition from public space to the main block, as well as the building’s ability to transform light, open plan, natural ventilation, and proportion into a coherent system of collective order. Finally, the article argues that the survival of the EPM as a post-classical monument depends precisely on this poetics of adaptation and legibility: an architecture that remains active by being reinterpreted and reappropriated within the city.
ISSN:1682-1106

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