The T2P research group carries out research in the area of the relationship between theory and the practice of design in the field of Architecture. The group’s object of study does not have a rigid geographic delimitation, but it will privilege research in the area of so-called Portuguese Architecture (in Portugal and around the world), without excluding foreign architecture and architects with architectural affinities with our particular design methods. Furthermore, the object of study does not have a rigid chronological delimitation but will always privilege Contemporary Architecture (in the sense of what is done today and now) or, in the case of studies on architectural practices of the past, in their (historical) relation to the architecture of today.
The methods adopted by the group will be neither exclusively scientific nor exclusively empirical. The group will always privilege the importance of empirical data but will also seek plausible explanations for the researched architectural styles that ultimately allow for a better understanding of these, extracting from them teachings for future architectural practices. The research methods adopted by the group will place great importance on drafting, on its virtues and its problems, that is, on the ability of drafting to bring visibility to the problems upon which architecture is moved and built. When not explicitly present, the research modalities of the group will always privilege its methodological characteristics: intuition, redesign, recognition of morphology, its strategic dimension, proportion and scale, demonstration of an idea, the trial-and-error method, the overlapping of possible solutions to the same problem, etc., etc.
The group has chosen to call itself “Theory and Design Practices” for the following reasons:
a.) theory, singular, to declare the importance given to the world of ideas that traverse the time and space of history and that would, ideally, form a unitary corpus of the discipline, in which contradictions and dissent exist but are softened;
b.) design practices, plural, to represent the plurality of hypotheses and directions that the craft of architecture does not and could never impede, which the group intends to cultivate as an openness to the world (of men and ideas), but refuses as common-place that today anything is possible and valid in a kind of pluralism without a name or ideas that this collective, currently being formed, recognizes, but does not see as reflective of itself.
Furthermore, the group believes in the modern project as the last link of architecture as a craft with day-to-day life, in a perspective that is progressive but not blind to history. The group sees itself reflected in and wishes to continue the legacy of the masters of the modern movement, in the pre- and post-war era, which is why it continues its research into the modern.