Crossing Borders In Macau: The Experience of Manuel Vicente

Essay, High Density, Jorge Figueira, Politics and economics, Territory and mobility

Affordable Housing, Architectural boundary, Architectural theory, Asia, Borders, Boundaries, China, Collective housing, Crossed border operations, Density, Eastern countries, Economics, Essay, History of Architecture, Housing, Lisbon, Macau, Macro-scale, Migration, Migrations, Mobility, Modernism, Politics, Population, Portugal, Residential, Social housing, Territory, Urban dynamics, Urban growth, Urban management, Urban mobility, Urban research

In 1983, an issue of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui presented “Huit Architectures Différentes”. The Fai Chi Kei, a project in Macau by Manuel Vicente (1934-2013), was published alongside works by Böhm, Renaudie, Niemeyer, Venturi, Shinohara, Sawade and Foster. Describing the ensemble of the two social housing blocks, the magazine refers to street “animation” which was not foreseen in the project, concluding that: “in contrast to preconceived ideas, a rigorous, even severe architectural writing is not necessarily monumental and sterile” (M.E., 1983, 37). This dichotomy between the “severity” of the architecture and the often suffocating appropriation of the created spaces is recurrent in Manuel Vicente’s body of work in Macau. The Fai Chi Kei, designed and built between 1979 and 1983, was the recipient of the 1994 Arcasia award and was demolished in 2010. It was the high point of Manuel Vicente’s social housing works, a synthesis of a complex itinerary and a mediation project between old Macau and the urban growth that took place in the 1970s and 1980s.