Perception and Invisibility: Urban-Architectural Reception of Lisbon Downtown

Abstract

This article starts from the “space-limit” concept, supported by a philosophical approach, in order to understand and interpret the Architecture and Urban Space perceptions between the visible and invisible. Architectural symbolic forms have simultaneously a tangible and visible part and an intangible and invisible one, where “outlines of absence” and metaphysical emptiness, open up to horizons of meaning. Under this way, architecture and urban space affect people’s perceptions and emotions making them the preferred arts of political, religious and economic powers, by inscribing symbolic forms associated with spatial conformation and shaping gazes, and movements through limits and lines of force. The Lisbon downtown Baixa Pombalina, will be the territory for a mnemonic and phenomenological reception, between visible and invisible.